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.

Comments

They should be doing the opposite

[Catamaran]

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.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[jythie]

Creation is usually influenced or built off earlier creations. Very little music is created in a vacuum, and the line between 'inspiration' and 'derived work' can be fuzzy and subjective.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[Simulant]

Most everything is derivative. It's not possible to be uninfluenced by copyrighted material.

Also, how is it remotely fair that the IP owners can perpetually reap income from work that was performed even 10 years ago let alone 70? Most of us get paid once for the work we do. Are the IP owners (not necessarily even the creators...) so much more deserving than the rest of us? Fuck everything about this system. IP does not exist. It's a figment of our collective imagination. I'm all for fair play but perpetual IP protection is not it.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[gurps_npc]

5 years is fine - with copyright extension for sequels. That is, if you have a sequel within 5 years, then your original copyright can be extended for another 3 years,

This encourages actually giving the people what they want sooner rather than later.

The thing is that most art can be divided into 3 categories - a) crap that no one would copy even without copyrights, b) pretty good work that need copyright protection for 5 years, but no one would copy after that anyway and c) mega-hits that earn so much money in the first 5 years that the original creators might quit and never do anything again unless we found a way to encourage them to create again - hence the copyright extension ONLY if they make a sequel.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[Mrs. Grundy]

The article makes is sound like this is a totally senseless, random act with no explanation, but that's a little misleading. While it's easy to argue that 50 years is already too long, Canada's 50 year term is also an outlier on the low end in the international community. Most other countries have a 70 year copyright term for recorded music, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, etc. The US allows for 95 years. Having copyright terms that uniform across international boarders is useful.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic chefs have 5 mother sauces. From Bechamel, Veloute, Espagnole, Hollandaise, and Tomate come most every sauce you've tasted in typical cuisine. When a chef takes one of those sauces, modifies it, and creates a brand new flavour, by your own rules, he is not very creative. In fact, based on your rules, no classical chef can ever be creative, no matter how hard they try.

Yet nobody shares your opinion. Could you inform us why? Or will the peanut gallery fill in the conclusion for you?

The same is present in music. If we boil it down, almost every single song contains an element of another. In fact, about the most creative music you'll find is electronic music, since some of it contains sounds that would never have made it into other music. Of course, funnily enough, many people would consider electronic music the least creative music of all!

Not only is it a matter of perspective, but it's also a matter of enjoyment. Even a small spark of creativity is excellent if the resulting product is good. Would you argue that you can't distinguish the Ghostbusters theme from I Want a New Drug? That because of, in your words, the complete lack of creativity nothing of value was created? The rest of the world disagrees.

I can mash the hell out of a piano keyboard, and it would likely be the most creative "music" piece ever. Nobody in their right mind will listen to it. The value is zero, but in your mind, I guess at least I didn't stifle any creativity so it's good for the industry.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[ebyrob]

> Having copyright terms that uniform across international boarders is useful.

Useful as an excuse to ping-pong term extensions across the Atlantic. Terms are extending 20 years every 20 years, hardly "limited times" let alone "promoting progress".

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[jythie]

Lawsuits between artists (or artists and estate owners) are becoming increasingly common. Like copyright infringement, the idea of what constitutes a derived work in music has slowly been expanding to include content that 'sorta sounds like' pieces from another work. We have been seeing an increased mining by estates and holding companies of back catalogs looking for blues/jazz/rock/etc from a few decades ago and then looking for artists today who sound similar enough to convince a judge.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[Rob Y.]

The problem with functionally infinite copyright isn't really that you lose the ability to copy the material for free. It's that the owners retain the exclusive right to distribution - and if they decide to stop making the material available it's lost. Perhaps there's some provision in the law that requires copyright owners to periodically reassert their rights in order to keep them - or better, a requirement that the owners offer the material for sale in order to keep the exclusive rights.

There's sort of a parallel issue with patents. The biggest problem with software patents IMO was the inability to get at material locked up in patented data formats. If an audio track was in MP4, and the only way to get at the content was to buy a copy of Windows that comes with a free MP4 player - or possibly buy an expensive MP4 player from Fluendo or some other company that licensed the ability to implement the CODEC, then you're out of luck trying to consume content you've paid for. Not exactly a copyright issue, but at the same time it's a case of intellectual property being held hostage to the whims of a corporation that are leveraging a file format in an anti-competitive way. It comes down to the point where there's no practical way to enforce sanity in IP law except to limit what can be monopolized that way.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[butalearner]

The Marvin Gaye estate successfully sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell for "Blurred Lines" for copyright infringement winning over $7 million in damages. The Marvin Gaye *estate* did that. The purpose of copyright is to let the creator profit from their work so they will continue creating works of art, but Marvin Gaye died 31 years ago! It doesn't matter if Blurred Lines is a ferociously terrible song that probably ruins people's appreciation of "Got to Give It Up." It makes absolutely no sense to claim that copyright is protecting the artist's livelihood.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[itzly]

Judging if one song sounds sufficiently like another is an endless opportunity for debate. Much simpler to have a clear expiration of copyrights.

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[Jason Levine]

IP does not exist. It's a figment of our collective imagination.

Exactly this. When copyright was at a sane length, the reason for it was so you didn't release a work and have that work immediately re-released by a dozen shady publishers who didn't give you a dime for your efforts. When something like that happened, it was a serious threat to creativity. After all, why work for years writing a great novel just to have six publishing companies steal it, print their own editions of it, and not give you any money for it. Worse, their editions would compete with your own edition and you would be making less sales/money as people bought the "wrong" edition.

The balance to this, though, was that your temporary monopoly only lasted a short time. After 14 years (28 years if you filed for a one-time extension), your work went into the public domain and almost all bets were off. You still couldn't republish it and attribute it to someone else, but you could write a sequel or base another work on it without the original author's consent.

This went fine for the most part until copyright holders saw the works entering the public domain and envisioned dollar signs leaving their pockets so they got the copyright terms extended again and again until they are, for all intents, perpetual. If a work is created today, is corporate-owned (so we don't get into "life of the author", and the terms aren't extended again (the latter being a big IF), my 8 year old has only the slimmest of chances of seeing that work in the public domain. (He would need to live to 103.) If he has a child at 25, my grandchild would see the work in the public domain when he turns 78.

I know we love extolling thinking long term, but what possible incentive does it give knowing that a work you create in 2015 will only enter the public domain in 2110?!!!

Re:They should be doing the opposite

[bzipitidoo]

Keep the goal in mind. We want more and better art It doesn't matter how it happens. Careful that what you are calling plagiarism really is plagiarism. And even if it is, if it is to the net benefit of society, then it is good. We can work out ways to compensate the original author, in those cases where plagiarism has really happened. It has been a long established principle that you can't copyright laws of nature or basic information. We're already contemplating the problem of someone generating every possible sequence of notes up to some small number, maybe 4, and copyrighting them all. 88^4 is only 60 million, which might seem too many to register at the copyright office, but definitely is not too many for a computer to go through.

Everyone loses when more money goes to lawyers than artists. Everyone loses when established industry bribes lawmakers to outlaw new distribution methods no matter how much more efficient they are. The entertainment industry would love, just love to turn the clock back to 1985, before mp3, Napster, and the Internet, and force the public to get new music on CDs. Never mind that distributing music via CDs costs hundreds of times more money in overhead. They would throw 90% of all our wealth away, their own included, if that increased their control. They've been told, repeatedly, that he universe does not work the way they imagine and wish, but that hasn't stopped them from foolishly wasting money on lawyers to try to force things to work the way they want.

Copyright extensions are pure scams

[Rashkae]

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.

Coming soon, the TPP

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a precursor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Re:Raise Them To Infinity!

[danbert8]

Or have the original architect or construction company forbid me from modifying my own house. Or prevent me from selling said modified house to a new owner.

Re:Raise Them To Infinity!

[gnupun]

Tell me how creators are getting screwed out of their rightful income after they've already kicked the bucket?

The same way the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of real estate owners would get screwed if their million dollar properties were seized by the government and made public domain after about 100 years of ownership by the first owner.

Re:Copyright has a good side

[Anonymous Coward]

U2 didn't make anything 50 years ago, their 1990 work wouldn't hit public domain until 2040 in Canada. They'll be dead by then, or as good as, but now this change pushes that back to 2060. Do you not even thing before you speak?

Rather than extending copyright, perhaps these people should investigate tax dodgers like Bono, and close the loopholes that allow them to avoid paying like everyone else?

Sifling uncreativity

[TiggertheMad]

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.