EU About To Vote On Copyright Extension

ConfusedVorlon writes "According to Christian Engström (Pirate MEP), 'Monday or Tuesday this upcoming week there will be another round in the fight against prolonging the copyright protection term for recorded music in the EU. Now is an opportunity to contact MEPs, Members of the European Parliament, and persuade them to vote against the term extension."

Comments

Make it permanent

[MBraynard]

Making the copyright permanent would create a greater incentive to create and would lower the cost for consumers by extending the time to earn back the investment and shifting the intersection of the price-demand curve down.

And do the same thing for drugs while you are at it.

Re:Make it permanent

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they need to attach a yearly property tax on all items copyrighted if it's extended.

You want a perpetual copyright? then you get a property tax attached to it. So if each song is worth millions as you claim in the courts, we TAX you at that value. Plus you pay taxes on it for every day it's not released to the public domain.

If they want to screw the people, then at least give us tax money out of it.

Hummm... What?

[Tei]

95 years? thats negating the right to use music that you have heard your whole life. Do these people voting understand why theres a limit?
If anything must be lowered, since music can start creating profit sooner and with computer networks can be instant and worldwide. Music don't need to move in slow trucks anymore.. has ben accelerated.

I have the feeling this has ben caused by political corruption. Money from these music companies. I hope I am wrong.

Re:Hummm... What?

[mentil]

I imagine it's less 'corruption' and more 'indoctrination'.
Imagine a conversation going something like this: "When music goes into public domain, its potential for economic use is wasted. In order to maximize economic activity the copyright term on music needs to be lengthened."
Throw in some statistics about the number of people employed in the music industry who remaster old music, and dollar amounts of how much is made from old music. Add some emotional pleas saying how poor old ladies like Yoko Ono etc. won't make any money from their relatives' legacy.
Basically they argue that economic purposes always trump public good, because economy is more important than anything. They probably even believe it, too.

Re:Hummm... What?

[metacell]

Real economists, on the other hand, realise that private use is also economic activity.If x people listen to a song, it produces the same amount of good regardless of whether they do it for free or have to pay for the pleasure. If all other things are equal, listening for free is preferable, since it cuts out the middle mean and reduces economic waste.

This is where I believe the pragmatic politician and the economist start to differ. The pragmatic politician says, "What about all those people who are employed in the recording industry? Won't they be out of a job?"
The economist answers, "Yes, but that's actually a good thing. That means labour is freed up to do something more useful. Selling and distributing music is not needed any more."
And the politician answers, "Sorry, but I have to think of people's jobs. I won't get re-elected if I make a few thousand people unemployed - especially not if they're people with strong lobbying groups and good connections to journalists and intellectuals."

The only time copyright is good for the economy, is when it provides a strong incentive to produce more artistic and literary works. Providing employment for artists and all the middle-men is not an end in itself.

Re:Hummm... What?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Basically they argue that economic purposes always trump public good, because economy is more important than anything. They probably even believe it, too.

We live in a democratic society. And since at least 1982, a "democracy" has meant a free market consumer economy, operating on top of a nominally free and representative society. Democracy has hitched itself to marketism and the two are by now, probably inextricably linked.

Every decision, every strategy, every policy and certainly every election in the modern democracy is focused around one thing: the economy. Nothing else matters; nothing. Not society, not progress, not religion, not justice, not equality, not fraternity, not libertyâ"nothing matters but the economy.

So I don't know how people can really complain here. We live in a democracy and that means the economy comes first. If longer copyrights are better for the economy, meaning that they make profit for private companies, then they will be extended. Nothing else matters. The economy comes first, now and always, above all other things, Amen.

Re:Hummm... What?

[mentil]

Cannibalizing sales from themselves is preferable to free downloads cannibalizing their sales. $10 cannibalizing $10 is better than $0 cannibalizing $10. Distributors don't care if their $10 comes from old or new songs.
If you look at music sales, they ARE shrinking recently. The long tail of old music is apparently large enough to justify the lobbying dollars required to get these copyright extensions passed, as long as that is true they will keep lobbying for extensions.

Too little too late...

[Manip]

While I support those that want to fight this, most EU countries already have the 70 year term in law already. Meaning local law already protects recordings for Life+70.

List of EU countries with Life+70 or more: UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Finland, etc

My point is this law actually does nothing at all...

Re:Too little too late...

[dabadab]

I guess you are mixing up things a little: while copyright protection in general is 70 years (or life + 70 years), sound recording and moviess are an exception so that they are protected "only" for 50 years.
However, any sane discussion about copyright should focus on cutting back the protection time to something like 20 years and getting rid of the ridiculous "life of the creator plus" part.

Re:Too little too late...

[Eivind]

Indeed, neither the public benefit, nor the value of stimulating creativity varies depending on how long the original author lives.

Thus it's plain silly to award protection based on how long, or how short, the author might happen to live.

Instead, make a flat-and-simple rule. 20 years from date of first publication, for example.

The degree of reduced stimulation is tiny: there are very few works that pull in insufficient-to-be-worth-it money in the first 20 years, but enough-to-be-worth it in the first 100.

This is so because *most* works are either economically worthless from the get-go, OR they're successful, for a limited time, OR in some rare cases, they're successful for a long time. In all 3 cases, length of copyright makes no real difference. (aslong as it's atleast long enough to cover the "limited time")

This leaves the mythical beast: The work that never sells significantly in it's first 20 years, yet that goes on to become a hit later.

These -exist-, but there are very few of them, and to add insult to injury, you'd have to know or guess that a work falls in this category, for that knowledge to influence your decision (are you gonna produce the work, or not)

In todays economic climate I strongly suspect "this won't do well now, but could do better in 20 years" would map to "don't produce" anyway.

Re:Good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

The odds of copyright terms not being extended are about the same as me being struck and killed by a meteor tomorrow.

That's the spirit, give up without a fight!

GP was killed by a meteor an hour ago but died a happy person due to this, you insensitive clod.

Copyright has become absurd

[Lord Bitman]

Copyright law at this point has become so absurd that you now have three options:
  - Do nothing. individuals completely ignore copyright law because it's insane
  - Make copyright law more absurd, thus weakening it further.
  - Weaken copyright law.

No matter what you do at this point, copyright law has pretty much "jumped the shark", and can't be considered relevant or applicable to any situation.

Re:Copyright has become absurd

[arkhan_jg]

You forgot option 4:

- Make copyright law more absurd, thus making it easier for large corporations to completely bankrupt anyone that tries to exercise their rights AND implement technical measures (DRM etc) such that customers who are unable or unwilling to breach copyright via the internet get less and less rights and utility out of the works and hardware they purchase copies of.

See: Loss of right of resale, i.e. first sale doctrine, via one-use registration codes or outright tying of purchase to a non-transferable account (steam, pretty much all retail pc games)
See: blocking using MP3s as ringtones on mobile handsets, forcing repeat purchase of already owned music
See: plays-for-sure
See: Recording industry suing amazon cloud service for not buying additional licences to store music that users have already paid for - including MP3s from amazon itself
See: do-not-record bit on broadcast media
See: HDCP etc making it harder for people with otherwise compatible equipment watching, recording, or legitimately backing up their HD media.
See: Apple lobbying (though thankfully failing) to make rooting the iphone illegal under the DMCA.
See: Sony suing the bejesus out of geohot et al to try and put the jailbreak genie of the PS3 back in the bottle.

etc, etc, etc.

This is a war. And they are winning the battles while losing the war. While copyright as currently implemented is absurd, and getting more so, there's a lot of damage being caused to legitimate uses - and users - while the big content middle-men flail around trying to stay relevant and stop losing the money they think they're due.

You lack imagination

[Mathinker]

I can think of at least another whole round of warfare which you've forgotten. Once the media groups have a large computerized database of music which is effectively under permanent copyright, they can easily take any independent musician's music and run automated matching. Chances are that they will find a match good enough to take said musician to court, even if their chances of winning are small. Result? Said independent musician either folds and signs, or quits making music. I find it unlikely that, at least for the first 15-20 years of this strategy, that the courts would catch on to what was going on, and start to sanction the media groups for abusing the court system. Even with the strategy of spam-suing the consumer infringers (where there are orders of magnitude more of them than successful, creative, independent musicians), it's taking ages for the the US courts to figure out what is going on.