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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.
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
Typically the artists are encouraged (or coerced) to "sell" their copyrights to publishers/record companies. So extending the copyrights puts more money in corporate pockets, not artists.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
Remember that copyright also include include free software.
And 5 year or less copyright would be a huge blow to the FOSS community as it would make all 5 year old GPL software including linux into the public domain.
As a result we'll see plenty of software based on outdated GPL software just so that it can be made proprietary. Hardly a good thing.
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
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.
What about d) moderate successes that build a slower success.
The release dates for the last 5 albums I bought were 1993, 1994, 2012, 2013, and 2014. The 1994 purchase was from a band with moderate success but nowhere near a mega-hit. I think there's a lot of groups like that, essentially middle class musicians who do need the income from from older releases (though I can't find any numbers to suggest how significant or insignificant that income might be).
I stole this Sig
The _real_ discussion point is that Copyright was designed to provide
a limited amount of exclusive time to the originator of the work.
Does anybody know why the original terms were set to the number of
years that they were?
Anybody?
Okay, they were drafted in a time when a letter could take a month to
reach its destination. Things moved slowly then, thus 14 years.
If anything, with modern technology, the time should decrease to match
the advancement in technology.
10 years should be the norm. That is a fact.
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!
The other problem is orphaned works. Take a random video game from the 80's and try to find who owns the rights to it now. Unless it was a big name company at the time, you're likely to have to navigate through a thicket of legal acquisitions, sales, bankruptcy proceedings, etc. It can be an extremely challenging effort just to find out who owns a work published 30+ years ago.
Now imagine that it is 2095 and you want to publish a "classic" from 2015. How would you track down the rightful owner over 80 years?!!
I'd like to see a renewal system in place. Ideally with limited renewals (e.g. 2 renewals and you're done) or ever-increasing renewal fees (e.g. $5 for first renewal, $50 for 2nd renewal, $500 for 3rd, etc.). This way, you would not only have a public record of who owns what, but you would force companies to either give up their unused works or pay more for them. Maybe Star Wars is worth renewing for a 10th time, but is RANDOM_CULT_HIT_FROM_1975?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
> 10 years should be the norm. That is a fact.
Or less. The value of materials older than that is limited. There are, of course, counterexamples, but they are the exceptions to the rule. Something like 99.9% of all songs that receive any income do so in the first 18 months, and that number continues to shrink as the companies churn out pop.
But forget music, what about snapshots? Every selfie you take is covered for 70 years after you die. Clearly there is something very wrong with that.