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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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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....
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
the Canadian governments are puppets to their corporate overlords and have historically supported incumbent monopolies over competition and innovation.
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.
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!
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!
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).
In the USA, the answer is "no". Unfortunately, some years ago the classical music label Naxos got greedy and put out a CD in the USA of a 1930s classical work, specifically Pablo Casal's recordings of the complete Bach cello suites. In Europe this recording had clearly entered the public domain, but not in the USA. In fact, there was no question that it was still under US copyright at the time Naxos put it out. Not only was it under copyright, but the US copyright owner (Capitol Records) had their own copy in print and sued Naxos for copyright violation. It was really idiotic for Naxos to try to get away this in the US market and they lost the case. But a worst case scenario happened in the case. The court that heard it (in my opinion) basically made up the law and came to the conclusion that every recording every made or sold in the USA, even as far back as Edison's first attempts in the late 1800s, was still under copyright in the USA because they basically claimed that "common law copyright" protected them until the US law covered them. Naxos couldn't really appeal this because they had no way to argue that what they did was legal, so this horrible court decision that all US sound recordings are still under copyright became US law. Short of convincing Congress to pass a law on the subject, we're basically screwed now as there's nothing ever recorded or sold in the USA that is in the public domain at this time. Do note that this crazy legal finding doesn't apply to books, movies or anything else.