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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."
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?
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!”
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.