UK Music Industry Calls For Truce With Technology

Stoobalou writes "The British music industry has called for a truce with the technology firms with whom it has till now fought a bitter battle over rights, royalties and file sharing. Feargal Sharkey, CEO of lobby group UK Music, told a conference in London this week that it was time for the music and technology industries to set aside their differences and strive instead toward a common goal: nothing less than the total global domination of British music."

Comments

Re:Your capitulation is insufficient

[phantomfive]

Nothing less than to abolish copyright will do. Copyrights and patents prevent progress in the sciences and the useful arts. They were an experiment that utterly failed.

I'd love to hear your evidence of this, because as far as I can tell, there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents. Certainly the number of inventions and works of art has increased since they were introduced, and certainly they have induced authors and artists to produce more (Winston Churchill, for example), and they have certainly rewarded the creators for the works, and they have made things like the GPL possible. This guy makes a strong argument that the patent system helped drive invention forward: for example, the steam engine was invented over a thousand years ago, but it wasn't until patents made it profitable to invent things that people began applying them to application they could think of. Maybe he's wrong, but it's an argument that needs to be addressed. I would love to hear your arguments.

Certainly there are abuses, like the one-click patent, and artist abuses by record companies, and the term for copyrights is probably too long, but these are things that can be fixed, they don't require an entire revocation of the system.

I hate to break it to you, but...

[hoggy]

...UK Music are not the UK music industry. Sharkey is a lobbyist with a bunch of artists on his side, but he doesn't speak for any of the publishers/labels.

I mean it's a refreshing opinion, but it doesn't represent any grand outbreak of common sense.

Re:Your capitulation is insufficient

[TheRaven64]

Since someone will no doubt reply asking for a citation, here is an article which describes in some detail how patents on early steam engines delayed the industrial revolution in Britain until after they had expired. It also describes how the James Watt attempted to get patent terms extended several times. He did get the original patent term extended to over 30 years, and tried to get them extended even longer. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it?