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Birthday Song's Copyright Leads To a Lawsuit For the Ages
New submitter chriscappuccio sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
"The song 'Happy Birthday to You' is widely credited for being the most performed song in the world. But one of its latest venues may be the federal courthouse in Manhattan, where the only parties may be the litigants to a new legal battle. The dispute stems from a lawsuit filed on Thursday by a filmmaker in New York who is seeking to have the court declare the popular ditty to be in the public domain, and to block a music company from claiming it owns the copyright to the song and charging licensing fees for its use. The filmmaker, Jennifer Nelson, was producing a documentary movie, tentatively titled 'Happy Birthday,' about the song, the lawsuit said. In one proposed scene, the song was to be performed."
1) Copyrights are supposed to encourage the creator to create more work. As soon as the creator is dead, the chances of her/him creating more work are somewhat diminished. At most a copyright period should be for N years or natural death of the creator, whichever comes first.
2) Corporations should be allowed to have some sort of copyright, after all, their payments to creators enables the creators' work. But these copyrights could be much smaller and of a different nature. Like an "exclusive license" that lasts upto the point the product is no longer actively published. "Actively" could be reasonably specified in some way; i.e. after the first year where sold copies amount to 10% of first-year sales.
3) How about getting rid of Mickey Mouse entirely?
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Corporations are not people, they are a legal economic structure to protect the owners personal assets.
How can corporations be people when they are property?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Then don't include life of the author in the equation at all. Give individual works the same copyright term as works made for hire.
Copyrights are supposed to encourage the creator to create more work. As soon as the creator is dead, the chances of her/him creating more work are somewhat diminished.
Post-mortem copyrights are supposed to encourage the author's estate to complete the author's unfinished works rather than shredding them. With no post-mortem copyright, Christopher Tolkien might not have allowed The Silmarillion to see publication.
Semitroll: wasn't slavery abolished? How did that wording go? What's the legal basis for a person being able to own a person-like entity?
The problem with "corporations are not people" is I've yet to hear an argument about how that would work, that cannot be used to infringe on "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".
I dislike the idea of Apple/Ford/McDonalds/etc having as much power as they do, but unless the plan we implement protects the NRA, the EFF, fuck, even PETA, I cannot support it.
5 years is probably too short. While I hate copyright, it also prevents mega corps from co-opting people's creations and selling it back to us/using it to sell their products and services. They already do this to a certain extent but could you imagine how awful it would be if they had free reign to do anything they wanted with everything after 5 years?
Imagine you wrote a song, filmed a short video or created this amazing illustration and 5 years later it was used by corporations to sell everything from toothpaste to cars. How would you feel about that?
Copyright law cuts both ways. While it's often controlled and exploited by the mega-corps it's also the only line of defense independent artists have against those same mega-corps.
Just posting for the hell of it. The message is in the sig... It is a universal truth.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A finished house is instantly worth money while creative endeavours are often not. Maybe for big corporations there are instant profits to be made but a band or artist that spends 10+ years developing a following and perfecting their artform will often be working for nothing in the hope that eventually it will all pay off. Copyright is abused by Big Media but Copyright is also the only thing that stops Big Media from exploiting independent artists.
Then if a member performs an illegal act, is not the association also performing the same illegal act?
To my mind the problem is the "corporations are people" mantra is only trotted out when it's legally convenient, and is promptly ignored when personhood would be inconvenient. Basically they get all the benefits of being a legal person, with none of the downsides.
So just as an idea, what if we we also classify corporations as something they are much more similar to? Another institution explicitly created for the concentration and leveraging of power (wealth being one form of power). Governments. Let the default assumption be that corporations have to comply with all regulations and constitutional limits imposed on the governments of the jurisdictions that they do business in. Cleary that might require some fragmentation - Google China and Google US would be subject to some fairly incompatible regulations, but that might be for the best. Do we really want to live in a world where corporate power rivals or exceeds that of many/most governments? (Democratic) governments are at least titullarly under the control of their populations, but I realy don't see global cooperation reaching the point where governments can effectively reign in the power of international mega-corporations any time soon, and even if the cooperation existed there doesn't seem to be the will. Not surprising since corporations (and the powerful people controlling them) are themselves largely responsible for selecting and empowering the candidates that the rest of us get to choose between.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Then if a member performs an illegal act, is not the association also performing the same illegal act?
An excellent question. If the association (a corporations) has the rights of a person should it not also have the responsibilities of one?
I'd rather just a straight up term of 30 years (or whatever number is most reasonable), regardless of whether or not the author is still alive.
First decade for free, $10 registration for the next year, doubling every year after that, in perpetuity. This allows the "owner" to extract any economic value they can see in the item, and very quickly puts the vast majority of works into the public domain. Central registration also makes it easy to find the owner if you actually do want access to the work for licensing or the like, or to find out if the work has been registered. Each ten years the cost go up by a factor of 1024.
Year 11 - $10 (total $10)
Year 12 - $20 (total $30)
Year 13 - $40 (total $70)
Year 14 - $80 (total $150)
etc.
Price for year "n" = $10 x 2^(n-10)
Total price to pay for every year up to and including year "n" = $10 x ( 2^(n-9) - 1)
Year 20 costs $10240, total cost $20470
Year 30 costs $10,485,760, total costs $20,971,510
The details of the free period length or the first yearly amount can of course be changed, but the doubling rate is what makes this type of system work. Make it five years free and one dollar for the 6th year, and it works great too. Heck, one penny for the first year gets you to the ten bucks level in a decade, so maybe that's the way to go.