100 Years of Copyright Hysteria

Nate Anderson pens a fine historical retrospective for Ars Technica: a look at 100 years of Big Content's fearmongering, in their own words. There was John Philip Sousa in 1906 warning that recording technology would destroy the US pastime of gathering around the piano to sing music ("What of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"). There was the photocopier after World War II. There was the VCR in the 1970s, which a movie lobbyist predicted would result in tidal waves, avalanches, and bleeding and hemorrhaging by the music business. He compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler — in this scenario the US public was a woman home alone. Then home taping of music, digital audio tape, MP3 players, and Napster, each of which was predicted to lay waste to entire industries; and so on up to date with DVRs, HD radio, and HDTV. Anderson concludes with a quote from copyright expert William Patry in his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: "I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."

Comments

The have fought and lost

[crovira]

The RIAA (and later the MPAA,) have fought EVERY single innovation that even looks like it might possibly impinge on their clients' business turf, right up until it becomes overwhelmingly clear that they're actually preventing their client's from making more money than if they kept their head in the sand.

If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens.

They are a creation dating from before the invention of democracy and all they have ever done is behave like it.

Re:The have fought and lost

[ledow]

Sheet music is possibly the most *highly* guarded copyright work that I've ever had to deal with. It's unbelievable, the licensing behind it.

Re:The have fought and lost

[im just cannonfodder]

lets not for get who is actually behind the MPAA - RIAA, these are the companies that need to be targeted and boycotted into changing their ways, purchase only 2nd hand media and do not purchase anything branded sony, why allow the fecktards to dictate Orwellian hardware DRM designed to take away rights not to stop piracy anymore.

Name and shame the companies as all the **AA trade group name is for is to protect the corporate globalists from bad press.


RIAA, CRIA, SOUNDEXCHANGE, BPI, IFPI, Ect:

# Sony BMG Music Entertainment
# Warner Music Group
# Universal Music Group
# EMI


MPAA, MPA, FACT, AFACT, Ect:

# Sony Pictures
# Warner Bros. (Time Warner)
# Universal Studios (NBC Universal)
# The Walt Disney Company
# 20th Century Fox (News Corporation)
# Paramount Pictures Viacom--(DreamWorks owners since February 2006)


============


If Sony payola (google it) wasn't bad enough to destroy indie competition you have this:

Is it justified to steal from thieves? READ ON.


RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/29/0335224.shtml

"With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/24/14132

Re:The have fought and lost

[commodore64_love]

Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.

Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music, but I don't cry about it anymore than I cry that the horsewhip or candlestick makers no longer exist. Some forms of technology are obsolete and have been replaced by better forms, like direct recordings from far-off places.

Re:The have fought and lost

[noundi]

The RIAA (and later the MPAA,) have fought EVERY single innovation that even looks like it might possibly impinge on their clients' business turf, right up until it becomes overwhelmingly clear that they're actually preventing their client's from making more money than if they kept their head in the sand.

If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens.

They are a creation dating from before the invention of democracy and all they have ever done is behave like it.

It's easy to persuade people into harming themselves, just play on their ignorance and pride, tell them that it "harms the economy" and they'll run miles for you.
 
About harming the economy. Whose economy? Mine or yours? (not you crovira, I'm referring to RIAA, MPAA etc.) Because from my perspective it seems to be a good deal. And if you're telling me that music or movies or even culture will stop to exist, I have a feeling you're just full of fucking shit and I'm willing to bet you any sum you want on the opposite. Now nobody in the industry would ever dare to make that bet since they know that they are just -- that's right -- full of shit.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.

Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music, but I don't cry about it anymore than I cry that the horsewhip or candlestick makers no longer exist. Some forms of technology are obsolete and have been replaced by better forms, like direct recordings from far-off places.

Actually I do lament that fact that our culture has become one of passive engagement with music, and for the matter sport. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone but by-and-large most people listen to music rather that create music, most people watch sport rather that play sport. But I don't think that the various content industries share this sentiment, quite the opposite in fact as the entire content ownership and distribution system relies on the commoditisation of culture

Re:The have fought and lost

[Chrisq]

Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.

Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music

No we do it in Karaoke bars.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Sponge Bath]

the professional keeps picking up high school and college chicks until he gets to old to rock out.

Wooderson: That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Performing is not "creating music". All of the "creation" is
being done by the guy that wrote the original bit of sheet
music. So we are not that much more passive than we already
were. We're just no longer in the practice of making our own
mediocre performances at home based off of works that are
sufficiently dumbed down.

OK. Perhaps I should have said performed rather than create (although don't underestimate the ability of people to improvise when they are encouraged to engage with music from an early age)

However your comments about mediocrity are exactly what I'm getting at, not all of us is Mozart or Beckham but music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.

Note that I am not saying we should not also encourage those with elite levels of talent but I believe that there is a healthy balance from which we've long strayed

Re:The have fought and lost

[Xiterion]

While it's true that simply performing is nowhere near the same as writing the music in the first place, there is quite a bit of expression to be had in simply playing a piece of music. I think there's something to be said for the accomplishment of learning your favorite song well enough to play it.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Java Pimp]

I find it interesting that gathering around the piano to sing music was used as an argument against recording technology, yet today they would consider it public performance and demand royalties. (At least that's the direction things seem to be heading.)

Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[betterunixthanunix]

As technology improves, we are eventually going to forget about copyrights; the laws might remain on the books, and big corporations will be busy suing each other over copyrights, but the average citizen will no longer be affected by them. We are almost there already; high school and college students download music and movies without a thought to copyrights, and share the files with their friends. Once they grow up, copyrights will have virtually no meaning for the average person in society.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[commodore64_love]

Here's what Thomas Jefferson (found of the democratic party) and James Madison (author of the Constitution) said about it:

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

"Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Madison -

"But grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself, in its original operation, may produce more evil than good." Sounds like Mr. Madison was talking about RIAA.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[langelgjm]

As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt."

I think copyright, and IP law in general has a legitimate and defensible purpose. That said, IP policy is essentially made without any regard to facts (you could argue that about a lot of policy, but in IP it's particularly bad). The fact that one can violate copyright law so easily, without intending it, and the fact that so much stuff of so little value is copyrighted, as well as really old stuff, breeds contempt of copyright law altogether.

The legitimacy of copyright law might be salvaged by cutting down the length of terms drastically, or otherwise changing the policy so that it is actually sensible. Barring that, though, as long as some written works from 1924 are still copyrighted, can you really blame people for thinking the whole thing is ridiculous?

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[Kokuyo]

Heh. When you manage to write three consecutive sentences without the use of the word 'fuck' we'll talk about you being allowed to call other people's posts 'drivel' again, okay?

Of course he's a troll but let's get over the same old arguments again, shall we?

Isn't it true that today, you don't need to be tech-savvy to get media for free? Is it not true that even if you had to be tech-savvy, EVERYONE knows someone who is?

If it therefore were true that, with media illegally being available for free, everyone would stop paying for it, then there couldn't possibly be any music recording studio or movie company left. Today.

The fact remains that only socially inept assholes don't pay for entertainment they enjoy (or people who don't have the money anyway). Those people always have the drive to smooch off of someone else. The technology has never mattered and will never matter. Those people don't pay, no matter the DRM. They are not lost sales due to P2P, they are lost sales, PERIOD.

There will always be people creating entertainment without getting rich in mind. Those are, arguably, the good entertainers. So I say kill copyright. Perhaps then the only thing remaining will be stuff that isn't the same old shit over and over again. After all, without any direct monetary incentive, those media conglomerate bastards just might not see the point in producing shit anymore. One can always hope, eh?

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[moz25]

One of the underlying questions is: with the millions of hours of music we already made, what benefit does it bring us to have even more music?

If you're a 80's music fan, then you already have everything you need ;-)

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[ledow]

"Without copyright how... do you think movies, music, games and software are going to remain viable endeavours?"

The answer is: the same way they did before and are doing now. "Piracy" is at its highest, if statistics are to be believed, but so are profits of all the above - in fact the proportions are greatly in favour of vastly *more* money being made now even with higher piracy. Movies, music, games, software = multi-billion dollar industries. One of the top-40 hits in the UK at the moment is by someone who sang along to YouTube vids. *With* copyright enforcement, she would be nothing now (and probably owe several thousand pounds of licensing fees), and we'd be at least one artist down. She's not the first and won't be the last. Most musicians give away or sell their music every day without a problem. It's only the "big" ones that do so for enormous profit and are *actually* represented by these organisations.

I have a friend who is in a relationship with a professional rapper. They don't make much money but they make enough. And all their music is just sitting on Myspace. It's got a Paypal button to let you buy a CD, but their stuff is original, good and given away on YouTube, MySpace and other sites. I don't think they've suffered under the current rates of piracy - I think they'd be nowhere without the exposure that giving their music away brings them.

It works both ways and it is, basically, an artform, not a business. It's like saying "without blue paint, how can artists thrive?!"... they did, for thousands of years, and still do and still would if all the blue paint disappeared. We didn't need blue-paint rationing, or companies telling us that blue paint is the express domain of artists, etc. Copyright is merely a tool to commercialise an artform. There are many ways of doing that, including just giving the damn things away to build a reputation to later release a real piece of art for huge profit.

And, unfortunately, copyright works both ways. If I want fair-use snippets, if I want to license them, if I want to do other things, there's no reason to stop me or make it prohibitively expensive - it's poor business. Ever tried to do this "officially"? Try and ask permission from a record company to use a song on a YouTube vid, or in a school play - see what assurances and what pricing structure they want to give you (I have, in the past, been quoted "per viewer" figures!). It's nothing to do with business, it's about controlling the media so that they can *tell* you what to buy next week (i.e. their next "up-and-coming" artist).

Copyright is already seriously lessened. Children are taught by otherwise-educated teachers to just "paste in something from Google images" which is a potential breach of so many copyrights in an hour's lesson that it's unbelievable. School plays are run off someone's iPod where they've downloaded relevant music and video. Kids share videos, music, ringtones, applications, etc. indiscriminately. It's already a lost cause unless you want to start criminalising everyone from toddlers to grannies. Give it a few decades and it will swing one way or another - you won't be able to make a piece of music without "enforcing" everything to do with it, or you won't be able to sell a piece of music at all. Both are absolutely terrible circumstances, but because of naive business practices, the artform is dying.

I should feel sorry for the smaller artists, for whom copyright is designed to help thrive, but in actual fact they are doing quite well enough on their own and will probably be the winners in the end. I think they've got the tech that replaces the need for the legislation now, so I wish them well. Music, especially, is part of life now. There were several decades of being able to commercialise that and almost every country in the world decided it was better to penalise that instead. Hence, the position now is that people really don't care any more. I don't know anyone who bought *every* song on their iPod.

I've bought t

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[commodore64_love]

And their Copyright Act of 1790 said the following:

- for the encouragement of learning
- limited term of 14 years with 14 year extension if the *original* author was still alive
- libraries, colleges, and private individuals were not subject to the copyright (i.e. fair use)
- was only for expensive works like books, not incidentals like maps or charts

This is the kind of copyright law we should have today, not the perpetual copyright that lasts ~100 years (five generations). When the original laborer who created the work dies, then the copyright should die as well. As Jefferson said "the Earth is for the living not the dead," and laws exist to serve the current generation not previous generations.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[mrsquid0]

There is still "80s" sounding music being created now. In fact, I am listening to my Modern 80s playlist on iTunes now. There are a lot of bands out there today that are doing a very good job of writing songs that would have been right at home in 1983. Music is constantly changing and reinventing itself (although you would never know it from listing to most of the RIAA pablum), so there is alway new and interesting music to discover, even if you are primarily interested in nostalgia, like the music of the 80s.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[commodore64_love]

Good point. The original "14 years" was derived by looking at actuarial tables, and determining how long the average artist lives after his creation. In 1790 the average was 13 years, 8 months..... today it would probably be longer..... still it was tied to the original creator's lifespan, not perpetual.

So that means Mickey Mouse, which was created in 1928, should now be public domain.

Sousa was right.

[LaminatorX]

Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music. They still exist, obviously, but have nowhere near the cultural prominence or respect that they once did.

Re:Sousa was right.

[eldavojohn]

Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music. They still exist, obviously, but have nowhere near the cultural prominence or respect that they once did.

Yeah, after reading the Sousa piece it was shockingly levelheaded and highly rational. He even admits he's an alarmist and that he has a biased view because of his personal stake in this. The last paragraph included in the Ars image is downright prophetic:

It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors have shown wonderful aggressiveness and ingenuity in developing and exploiting these remarkable devices. Their mechanism has been steadily and marvelously improved, and they have come into very extensive use. And it must be admitted that where families lack time or inclination to acquire musical technic, and to hear public performances, the best of these machines supply a certain amount of satisfaction and pleasure.

He almost sounds like a cautious promoter or early adopter himself! Unsurprisingly the Ars article only gives us the first sheet of a lengthy opinion that can be found here. Good reading to realize that these debated issues today are nothing new.

Re:Sousa was right.

[LaminatorX]

We keep our ASCAP and BMI site-license agreements posted on the refrigerator. It's only annoying when the auditors show up to sample set lists and expect to stay for dinner. Awkward.

Their problem now...

[MikeRT]

Is that they run their businesses like they're not subject to all the norms of business. They don't budget properly, do cost or quality control well, don't cater to niche markets well, don't treat their customers very well and often don't even know really what their customers will probably want.

If they would start doing some quality and cost control, treat their customers well and provide them the content whenever and wherever they want it (for a modest fee), the public's attitude toward piracy would be markedly different.

Re:Copyright is not about innovation

[JasterBobaMereel]

DVD invented as a data storage medium by a consortium of computer companies including Sony, and extended to store movies the consortium was founded by Computer companies and the movie companies joined it later ....

Blu-Ray were invented mostly by Sony, as a data storage medium - the Movie companies (including Sony's movie division) only got involved when the standards for movie formats for these discs were being decided ....

So Sony has divisions which deal in Movies and Music, and divisions which don't ... and they work together when they need to ... but it does not mean the Copyright industries innovate ...