Overzealous Enforcement Means Even Legit Music Blogs Deleted
AnotherUsername writes "Recently, many [Google-hosted] music blogs were deleted for hosting mp3s of songs by various artists. The problem? The music blogs in question had been given permission to host the songs, and often, the older links to mp3s were often broken intentionally by the bloggers in order to save bandwidth. From the article: 'You're reading this right: Five years of Lipold's labor of love was deleted, in part, because he posted a track with full permission of a label, and the track apparently wasn't even online by the time the IFPI filed its complaint.'"
By the way, I refuse to cooperate in the slightest until I get at least one thing: a functioning public domain. Not this pretend one where perhaps after I'm long dead, maybe, just maybe - assuming no more extensions: my grandchildren will get to copy Steamboat Willy. There is no public domain if it doesn't happen in my lifetime: fact. Without my public domain I unilaterally declare the whole of copyright null and void, "they" broke it first so no agreement until "they" come back and deal in good faith. Because apparently politicians do not believe that Citizens need to be consulted for their positions to bargain with at the copyright table. Guess they're just too damn busy stuffing the money into their pockets as fast as possible under the table. It's a Sonny situation. Heh.
Shh.
It's completely ass backwards and results in a total thwarting of creativity.
I compiled some research recently to assess creative work ethic amongst musical artists from the 60s to the present. It had nothing to do with copyright originally, but the data can easily be arranged to show some interesting things about what effect increasing copyright lengths may or may not have on creativity.
Using album lengths of studio albums for these artists I came up with a figure I called CPY, which just stands for content per year, which is measured in minutes. For this post, I took my data and divided the artists between 2 groups: Pre 1978 & Post 1978. Jan 1, 1978 is when the 1976 Copyright Act took effect BTW.
The Pre 1978 group had an average CPY of 42.55 minutes
The Post 1978 group had an average CPY of 30.6 minutes
This is about a 28.1% reduction in creative output after the copyright act took effect. Now, correlation does not imply causation, so it can't necessarily be said that this dramatic drop was caused by the copyright act. However, it can certainly be said that the copyright act definitely is NOT causing an increase in creative output. There is no evidence of such in the data whatsoever. In fact, creative output has held close to the margin of error from the 80s onward in my data.
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. " ---Henry David Thoreau