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The Great Canadian Copyright Giveaway: Copyright Extension For Sound Recordings
An anonymous reader writes: Despite no study, no public demands, and the potential cost to the public of millions of dollars, the Canadian government announced yesterday that it will extend the term of copyright for sound recordings and performances from 50 to 70 years. The music industry did not raise term extension as
a key concern during either the 2012 copyright reform bill or the 2014 Canadian Heritage committee study on the industry. For Canadians, the extension could cost millions of dollars as works that were scheduled to come into the public domain will now
remain locked down for decades.
50 years is already way too long. They should reduce it to 3-5 years. That would give the artist plenty of time to make a profit. Unfortunately, copyright as it is now implemented and enforced is entirely for the benefit of large corporate interests. It stifles creativity rather than promoting it.
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And Beyond!
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
We're all really American, after all.
No one on planet earth will be allowed to talk because every word in every language will have copyright restrictions. You'll need a DRM implant in your brain directly connected to MPAA.
How? Although I think it's a stupid move, how would this cost Canadians millions? Are there recordings that we urgently need to make use of some time in the next few years that we'll suddenly have to buy? Please explain....
The content industry controls the government, so the government will do whatever the content industry tells it to do. There may not have been any public demands by the content industry, but you can be pretty sure that there were backroom deals....
Funnily a documentary made by a Canadian a few years ago talks all about this and how copyright in it's current state is a pile of BS https://vimeo.com/8040182
Whether or not a longer copyright term will help promote the arts are encouraging more investment in art production is debatable. I have a strong oppinion, but so do many others with the opposite.
However, there is no theory whatesoever that retroactively extending copyright terms does anything to promote the creation of new art/culture (recall, the whole point of government granted copyright monopoly in the first place.) In fact, there is strong evidence that works still under long copyright are supressed until they become public domain.
I think we can conclude that any politicians singing on to retroactively extend copyright terms are clearly corrupt.
Right when Baby Sittin' Boogie was about to go public domain!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Michael Geist, is that you?
Sounds like a precursor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
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BE SURE TO PAY YOUR $699 CASSETTE LICENSING FEE YOU POUTINE-SWILLING MOOSE BOTHERERS!
Home Recording is Killing the Corporate Music Industry. Ignore Commercial Radio.
the Canadian governments are puppets to their corporate overlords and have historically supported incumbent monopolies over competition and innovation.
He's a dick.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
...of why I fileshare.
Why even bother with copy write? What's the point if it keeps on getting extended?
There's a lot of bad feeling on this thread about the extension of copyright, but there are a lot of positives. For example:
- Copyright income lets bands keep on making great music. It's likely that with a short copyright term, U2 wouldn't have made an album after 1990.
- The income allows artist to perform great philanthropic and charitable deeds. Let's face it: the United Nations as it is today is almost completely down to Bono.
- Artists support great works in other fields. E.g. would the Ferrari LaFerrari exist without buyers who relied on copyright income? I think not and that would be a tragedy.
This is a modest extension and a good thing for everybody.
I was just waiting until 2024 when Bachman-Turner Overdrive will be free.
Now I have to wait until 2044, I'll be dead by then.
Does anyone know if *any* work has become public domain in the last few years in US and Canada? From what I see it just sounds like anything that's was copyrighted will now forever be copyrighted as copyright gets extended by X years every X years (with X=20 here).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
But somebody must have paid secretly. At one point in time this was called bribery and people doing this and got caught were put in jail. Nowadays it seems to be the law of the land... Oh no, the law of the chosen few - chosen by god or something like that.
why hot just make it infinite and automatic transfer to the artists offspring. Really with 70 who cares might as well be infinity,
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
If I'm young and I write something today and I die 80 years later, the copyright term will outlast everyone alive today and is therefore longer than any reasonable definition of "for a limited period of time."
When the time comes I hope someone sues to declare all works in the public domain as soon as there is nobody left alive who was around when that work fell under copyright.
Unfortunately nobody can make this challenge until the 2030s at the earliest, since everything put under copyright before 1923 is already in the public domain and there are hundreds if not thousands of Americans over 110 years old.
Personally, I wish the courts would define "a limited period of time" as something like "the expected lifespan of a newborn child in the United States if the child survives to age 5" (e.g. excluding infant/early-childhood mortality) - somewhere in the 75-80 year range. But I very much doubt the Supreme Court would accept this, given that they already allow "95 years" for corporate copyrights.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They'd make copyright indefinite if they could. Check out freemusicarchive.org It's like the Free Software movement or Open Source Software movement for music.
Cinderella
Snow White
Sword in the Stone
Robin Hood
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Sleeping Beauty
Tangled
Frozen
Mary Poppins
Pinocchio
Pocahontas
Tarzan
That's just off the top of my head...
What would Disney do without public domain?
This is Canada. Canada has "moral rights" which allow creators to block the use of their creations in ways that disparage the creator (and possibly "disparage the work itself" - I'm not fully fluent in Canadian law). These rights are not transferable.
An example would be if a person spewing hate later repudiated his previous writings. He could use the "moral rights" clause to enjoin any publication of his works if they had the effect of implying that he, the author, still held those views, even if someone else held the copyright.
I see no problem in vesting "moral rights" to the author for the life or the author, provided that it is only used to 1) get an injunction, 2) sue to recover actual harm done to the author by the disparaging use (this would be separate from any copyright-related damages if the copyright were still in effect).
Personally, I wish the United States had a reasonable, limited "moral rights" rule.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Your imaginary property has no value here.
It could be the lack of sound wave propagation .
How does it stifle creativity? If you reuse copyright material you aren't being very creative.
Oh really? Go listen to Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys and say that again with a straight face. Huge chunks of that album are samples and remixes, and it is a rather famous example of how creative you can get reusing copyrighted material.
There are all sorts of works of art that are based off of using other people's creations in even more direct ways. Weird Al has been creating pop music parodies for decades that are based on other people's material, he seems pretty creative. Look at Johnny Cash's cover of the song 'Hurt', originally recorded by Trent Reznor. It was so good that Trent himself said that it wasn't his song anymore.And there are literally thousands more examples like these.
Saying that you cannot be creative by re-using other people's work is a very small minded view of art.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It's that the owners retain the exclusive right to distribution - and if they decide to stop making the material available it's lost.
Spot on in general, but not for music. Thanks to "mandatory licensing" systems in the United States and possibly other countries, anyone willing to pay the statutory fee can reproduce it under limited circumstances. I don't think mandatory licensing covers wholesale physical reproductions or digital downloads, but it does cover sampling and it does cover playing the complete work over the airwaves (you (the radio station operator) do have to have a copy to play of course).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
First post ever here. I’m curious: shouldn’t these kind of terms (or whatever it’s called) apply for net new creations? I don’t understand why they apply to things already copyrighted. New terms should apply only to new creations. Does it change for different countries? I think the amount of years really depends on how much we want 1) to share with people and 2) for how long do we really expect to earn money out of it. I would prefer to simply share, but in the likelihood that I want to share and make some money out of it, I would say 20 years is more than enough. Of course some material would still make money even after 50 years (we still listen to The Beattles, don’t we?), even 70 years (Mozart, Bach, etc.), but I think it’s mostly how we want to give back to society. My opinion is governments should thrive to make people want to give something back to humanity. I don’t like imposing too much, because to be honest, the day I don’t want to share, I don’t and those are my terms, but for 70 years? Come on!
Hey Harper, WTF happened to democracy? Did you miss that day in school. No more votes for you.
I'm sure that this was decided in some back room bullshit deal with american politicians or studios
anyway fuck off with the Americanizing Canada. We don't want to be you, forget your southern fence build a northern one i bet we'd even help.
In fact, there is strong evidence that works still under long copyright are supressed until they become public domain.
More importantly, it suppresses derivative works until the underlying original falls into the public domain.
If I were to create a fictional story, it's very likely that the things I have read in my life will subconsciously influence what I write.
To protect myself legally, I have two things that can protect me:
1) Don't publish my work until after all works that exist today are out of copyright, or
2) Base my work on something that is in the public domain (Shakespeare and ancient myths are common sources for writers, but anything published in the US prior to 1923 should be fine). If someone claims I stole from them, I can say "no, I stole from another source, and you probably did as well."
#2 won't protect me if I unintentionally/sub-consciously steal details like the names of characters or specific modern settings. In other words, if I redo Romeo and Juliet, it should not involve two street gangs or be set in a late-20th-century major Western City or the copyright-owners of West Side Story might come after me. But if West Side Story had been a nearly-completely-original work (i.e. neither Romeo and Juliet nor any other opposite-culture-therefore-forbidden teen romance had ever been written) if I would risk being sued if I wrote about two star-crossed lovers who lived 500 years ago.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Get these morons out!
And as seems to be the pattern for this government, they've shoved the measure into the annual budget bill, which the party MPs must vote for, rather than treating it as a separate issue deserving of proper consideration by Parliament and via public consultation.
It's just a big "here's more money" for the content owners and a big "FU" to everyone else.
Do I really care if a "musician" gets his CR extended? No, but how about drugs? Or specific equipment or firmware.
It appears to me the corps (and others) are trying to get increase, not only in time, but what is covered and allowed.
The people behind these moves never invent anything, they are the lawyers and business class people.
The termites... the bean counters, the useless, never made a thing in their lives but know exactly how top extract monetization from some naive kid and his first hit song/invention.
“The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.”
George Bernard Shaw
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
, proof is the amount of content available today.
That is a pointless argument, as you have nothing to compare it to. I could just as easily make the counter claim (which is just as hollow) that there would be twice the content available if the laws were different.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
All creative work is in some way derivative of something created by someone else.
In 1998 the Copyright Law was changed so just about everything that was under "normal" "75 years" or "life + 50 years" got extended by 20 years.
The only things that might have come into the public domain since then were those things covered by less-commonly-used provisions. For example, one of the new provisions was that corporate words expire after 120 years even if they were published less than 95 years ago (i.e. even if their copyright was less than 95 years old). It's possible that at least one such work entered the public domain in the last few years in the USA.
There are some other "oddball" copyright provisions that weren't extended by 20 years or which would allow something to fall into the public domain that was previously under copyright.
Also, there was at least one court case where a work believed to be under copyright was found to have fallen into the public domain long ago due to someone forgetting to renew the copyright.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...and give their products away for free.
Compared to the size of the IT industry, the music industry is minuscule. We should just nationalize it.
This is almost certainly due to backroom American bullying. When the country that is most likely to invade you has nukes, you take them seriously.
When they took away public domain they reneged on their side of the social contract.
There is no reason for us to uphold our end of the bargain.
Pirate away folks, its legal & moral & will continue to be so until Mickey Mouse becomes public domain.
Time to load up your smartphones and mp3 players with that swinging pre-war and war time music with the performers who died in the war at the latest, Canadians.
Saw this somewhere else so credit goes to them.
For the first 25 years free annual extension of copyright then every year thereafter
fee is 2^(year-25)
Year 26 $1
Year 27 $2
Year 35 $1024
Year 45 $1,048,576
Year 50 $33,554,432
Year 55 $1,073,741,824
Year 60 $34,359,738,368 - At some point mickey mouse will become unprofitable and go into the public domain
While I don't personally agree with this, I get that businesses and musicians and such want copyright to last for a really really long time. There's a way to meet their desires and satisfy the public's desire for things to actually enter the public domain. If these copyrights are so valuable that 50 years is simply too short, then rather than give extensions away for free, make the copyright holder fill out a form, just like they used to have to do, and pay big money for an extension. Offer 20 year extensions, but make the rate they charge go up exponentially with each renewal. Perhaps the first renewal costs $100,000. The 2nd renewal costs $10 million dollars. The 3rd renewal costs $1 billion and so on. I'm pretty sure that even Disney isn't going to pay $1 billion to keep Steamboat Willie out of the public domain or even if they do pay it for that one, there would be plenty of other properties that they simply can't afford to renew and thus they'd have to enter the public domain. If these are so valuable then why isn't the government getting paid for each renewal? And if the copyright holders forget to renew in time, well, tough. In the old days people did forget to renew and nobody cried out that this was just the most unfair thing ever in the history of mankind.
Another way to be consistent is for everyone else to decrease the length of their copyright terms to match Canada's.
Copyright owners would argue that shortening the term of a subsisting copyright is an unlawful "taking" of their property. One country's constitution states: "Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Other countries likely have similar provisions on the books. So the government would have to tax its citizens to pay fair market value of the copyright in each affected work.
If you disapprove of [major music publishers'] practices, the solution is very simple: do not buy from them.
That's harder than it sounds. I buy food at a grocery store, and a percentage of what I pay ends up going toward playing the major music publishers' music over the speaker system.
And if you use someone's copyright content all you have to do is the pay the royalty.
How so? Apart from a small number of compulsory licenses, the copyright owner reserves the right to decline a license at any price for any reason. Besides, who owns copyright in a work first published by a company that has since ceased to exist?
There are thousands of songs released monthly (and that doesn't include the indie scene, or any other media productions that include music).
What steps do the composers of these "thousands of songs" take to ensure that they do not accidentally infringe a copyright?
The record labels (here CRIA, the Canadian RIAA, trying to hide behind the official-sounding 'Music Canada' moniker) often like to say that there is no benefit to society when works fall into the public domain.
Here is what I use. Suppose you haven't been in touch with your father and you learn he passed away, and you have inhereted whatever is in the house he rented. You go to this house, up the attic and find a few dusty containers full of old 50s and 60s vinyl records, most performed by artists you've never heard of, with a record player. You start listening... and can't get enough!
These records falling into the public domain, and being made available by volunteers, is like giving is all these dusty containers full of old vinyls to go through. Yes there might be the odd Leonard Cohen (haven't seen him line up at the food bank, by the way), but the large majority has been forgotten. This is our heritage! This needs to be preserved and widely shared.
On another note, people with vast vinyl collections purchased with the understanding that they would enter the public domain in the mid-to-late 2010s, are they eligible to demand compensation for the sudden drop in value?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
I was going to comment that perhaps they could just add the line "...the term of copyright shall be XX, OR the life of the creator." That way, you get long copyright, but the content creator is always the one who benefits (unless he sells his rights, which is where all the BS comes from anyway, where an corporation with theoretically infinite lifespan wants rights forever)...
Then I though, well maybe not. We might be promoting the new job classification of "Copyright Hitman"...
So what do you do for a living? "Oh I hunt down and kill musicians. It's dirty work, but I like to think I make a difference..."
The parody defense works when the derivative work has to make a comment on the first work or its author, not just the same song with different lyrics. (See Seuss v. Penguin .) This is why Mr. Yankovic licenses the songs from their original songwriters, because not all of his songs setting new lyrics to an existing tune are parodies in the strict legal sense. Perhaps the clearest cases under the parody defense can be made for "Perform This Way", "(This Song's Just) Six Words Long", and "Achy Breaky Song". But what comment does "Word Crimes" make on "Blurred Lines" or its composers Marvin Gaye and Pharrell Williams?
Show me where it says that.
I would be very surprised if Canada's copyright law lacked a counterpart to Title 17, United States Code, section 502, reproduced below:
What steps do the composers of these "thousands of songs" take to ensure that they do not accidentally infringe a copyright?
You are coming off the main topic of copyright extension.
Not necessarily. When I asked a similar question in the past, the reply was to the effect "Record a cover version of a song whose copyright has expired." If copyright is perpetual, that is no longer an option. Even if not, as the copyright term increases, the set of subsisting copyrights in published works becomes larger, and it becomes more difficult to compose around all works in this set.
The copyright should protect the artist for his actual work, not resemblance of his work. That would solve the whole issue wouldn't it?
I imagine that the "nonliteral copying" and "derivative works" provisions in copyright statutes and case law were intended to plug the "change one word and it's a new work" defense.
I'm confused by why people are hung up on the time constraints. The expiry isn't the issue, its the definition surround what is copyright that's an issue.
Just one more example of a conservative government stealing from the many for the benefit of the few.
Only boring people are ever bored.
The reasoning on Weird Al's web site appears to be based on Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, which ruled that 2 Live Crew's "Pretty Woman" was a comment on Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" and therefore a permissible parody. Likewise, The Wind Done Gone was a comment on Gone with the Wind. But I don't see how "Word Crimes" is a comment on "Blurred Lines" in the same manner. It's just Mr. Yankovic airing his pet peeves related to poor grammar, usage, and mechanics on the part of Internet users in a snarky Schoolhouse Rock! manner.
Because as one of the traditional safety valves, expiry acts as a check on the application of overly broad copyright. How many authors do you think the Shakespeare estate could sue? In addition, expiry limits the deadweight loss caused by exclusive rights in orphan works.
As much music as what? You have nothing to compare it to. You cannot say what the industry would have done if there was no copyright, so the volume of content we have today proves nothing. For we know, we might have twice the content if we had no law getting in the way of creating content. So, sorry, your claim is still worthless.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Half the countries in the world have copyright terms less than the average. For each one that raises it, we should force an above-average one to lower it. Otherwise, the average just keeps increasing. This is the same argument used for public union pay. Why would you pay your cops less than the average?
I would think that it might actually help for the availibility of the recording and indexing.. I buy most of my music in digital format. If the song or album is free, where is the incentive to keep it somewhere like the itunes store? Sharpen those spikes. HDs and SSDs in server farms cost money. If the thing has no value, why keep it around. Why index it in Apple's artist suggestion engine if you can't sell it. I like poking around and buying stuff if it isn't too expensive.
Such a copyright term applied to works with an individual author would violate the Berne Convention, which all World Trade Organization members must adopt. The Berne Convention requires a minimum term of 50 years after the death of the last surviving author or 50 years after publication for works with a corporate author. A country adopting such a copyright term for works with an individual author would get kicked out of the WTO and see its exports in unrelated industries become subject to prohibitive import duties.
So why aren't we fixing the real issue of overly broad copyrights?
Because that would require national legislatures to actually do non-trivial work. They're already busy enough deciding whether and how much to spend on particular military, entitlement, and military entitlement projects. Nor have they seen any evidence that reforming overly broad copyright would win them more votes, especially when Hollywood promises them essentially free ad time to reach their constituents during election season but only if they "behave" (FOX News; The Hollywood Reporter).
Copyrights aren't property.
I thought property was defined as that which is subject to exclusive rights. I don't know about Canada, but the United States Code has used the term "intellectual property" to refer to copyright at least since 1996 when the Communications Decency Act added 47 USC 230. If you disagree with this definition, whose definition are you using so that we don't talk past each other?
Also, they restrict other people's freedom of speech.
The opinion of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft held that the safety valves of fair use and the idea/expression divide keep copyright from unduly restraining speech.
You are so fucking stupid, it simply hurts. You give a bad name to dumb people. The logical hole in your argument is so huge, I could drive a dump truck though it. Now, most people could understand the logical problem with your claim, so I have honestly wonder if you are just shilling because you are an entertainment lawyer or some other paid big entertainment whore.
Claiming that because there was growth, that the laws aren't stifling creative output, is pointless. Growth might be boosted or stifled by the laws, but you cannot know because YOU HAVE NO BASELINE to compare it to. Shit, you haven't even tried to look at the industry growth vs. population growth. While those stats don't prove (or disprove) your claim about laws, you could see that a industry's 'growth' vs. population growth is might actually be a decline.
Please delete all your accounts, format your computer, and sell it to a homeless Frenchman as a broken etch-a-sketch. You are to dim to be allowed to have an opinion anymore. Please report to the nearest construction site and volunteer as landfill, for which you are actually qualified.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!