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The Beatles, Bob Dylan and the 50-Year Copyright Itch
HughPickens.com writes: Victoria Shannon reports in the NY Times that fifty years ago was a good year for music, with the Beatles appearing on Billboard's charts for the first time, the Rolling Stones releasing their first album, the Supremes with five No. 1 hits, and Simon and Garfunkel releasing their debut album. The 50-year milestone is significant, because music published within the first half-century of its recording gets another 20 years of copyright protection under changes in European law. So every year since 2012, studios go through their tape vaults to find unpublished music to get it on the market before the deadline.
The first year, Motown released a series of albums packed with outtakes by some of its major acts, and Sony released a limited-edition collection of 1962 outtakes by Bob Dylan, with the surprisingly frank title, "The Copyright Extension Collection, Vol. I." In 2013, Sony released a second Dylan set, devoted to previously unreleased 1963 recordings. Similar recordings by the Beatles and the Beach Boys followed. This year, Sony is releasing a limited-edition nine-LP set of 1964 recordings by Dylan, including a 46-second try at "Mr. Tambourine Man," which he would not complete until 1965. The Beach Boys released two copyright-extension sets of outtakes last week. And while there's no official word on a Beatles release, last year around this time, "The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963" turned up unannounced on iTunes.
The first year, Motown released a series of albums packed with outtakes by some of its major acts, and Sony released a limited-edition collection of 1962 outtakes by Bob Dylan, with the surprisingly frank title, "The Copyright Extension Collection, Vol. I." In 2013, Sony released a second Dylan set, devoted to previously unreleased 1963 recordings. Similar recordings by the Beatles and the Beach Boys followed. This year, Sony is releasing a limited-edition nine-LP set of 1964 recordings by Dylan, including a 46-second try at "Mr. Tambourine Man," which he would not complete until 1965. The Beach Boys released two copyright-extension sets of outtakes last week. And while there's no official word on a Beatles release, last year around this time, "The Beatles Bootleg Recordings 1963" turned up unannounced on iTunes.
Copyright extension is stealing.
Sums up the mickey mouse laws that Sony, Disney and their ilk have created in the industry. It has nothing to do with copyrights it has everything to do with control of content. If I want to include an RCMP officer in full dress uniform in a stage play even in the country where they come from then I have to get permission from Disney to use the image.
It is time for someone to challenge this nonsense and expose the practices of these charlatans for what they really are. Then perhaps the public will wake up to the real damage to freedom of expression in the entertainment industry that these corporate thieves and their myrmidons in government have foisted upon the audience.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
The Beach Boys released two copyright-extension sets...
That's not true. "The Beach Boys" didn't release anything. The rights to their work were stolen in the 1960s by their manager and sold to A&M records:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
A&M is owned by UMG:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
The largest Music publishing company in the world who's owned by Vivendi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
Who's worth nearly $50 billion, and has profits in the $3 billion/yr range...
and you wonder why copyright laws get changed in their favor... lol
When arguing about copyright law, always keep in mind... the people that "own" these copyrights are almost never the artists or their families. Business own then and the attempts to extend copyright into perpetuity has absolutely nothing to do with rewarding the creator of the music. It has to do with extending what was usually a theft from an artist, into a theft from mankind as a whole.
Watch the following movie for more details on that side of the business:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
I don't like 30 seconds to mars, but that movie matches what many of the musicians/bands I've met have said about the industry.
And here's an article written by Courtney Love 15yrs ago... and it's also pretty much dead on:
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/1...
The real pirates are the music labels.
Copyright is to encourage the public release of creative works for the betterment of society. The temporary monopoly on profits from those works is the incentive, not the purpose.
And people on slashdot wonder why nobody around here has any respect for copyright anymore... It's because the original deal was broken. They kept extending to the advantage of the copyright holders, with absolutely zero concessions for the public. How is that fair? Why should I respect that?
Yes, the public should be allowed to profit from the work of others.
That's exactly true, and in fact that's the reason that the US Constitution plainly states that copyrights are to be granted only for limited times. The founders of this country clearly wanted the public to profit from the works of others, after as little as 14 years.
So is the bricklayer that built my house. I can't remember paying him a dime in the last 20 or so years, though.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
People like you can't seem to wrap your heads around the difference between the physical product of some unit of manual labor, and the creation of an idea.
I know that they're completely different. Copyright fanbois are the ones who don't realize that copyrights are a ham-fisted attempt to make an infinitely replicable idea seem more like a physical object via creating artificial scarcity through government fiat.
And the differences don't apply to my point: You do some work. You get paid for it. Then you should move on and do more work. Your grandchildren should not be able to charge rents a century down the road based on artificially created scarcity without having to do work themselves. That makes no economic sense.
Compare the value of all the tea in crates on docks in Boston harbor in 1776 against the intangible ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and tell me which was more valuable.
Indeed those documents were very valuable. Somehow they even got created without the benefit of copyright protection or ownership rights by their authors. How could that be? Maybe it's because copyright is highly overrated in the first place.
Just explain to me why an artist should be entitled to live off one single creation for the rest of his life while everyone else has to keep working to earn money.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.