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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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We're all really American, after all.
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.
Sounds like a precursor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
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
There was a court case raised recently - not sure if it has started or finished yet - by descendants of Goebbels' family. Yes, *that* Goebbels, Hitler's rentamouth. His family are claiming copyright for his words - they want cash for quotes.
70 years is just long enough to cover that.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
the Canadian governments are puppets to their corporate overlords and have historically supported incumbent monopolies over competition and innovation.
Does real estate become public domain after 100 years of ownership?
I wouldn't want to pay indefinite royalties to the construction company/architect for a cookie cutter house design. Would you ?
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.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
, 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!
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.