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The Great Canadian Copyright Giveaway: Copyright Extension For Sound Recordings

Posted by Soulskill on from the naturally-snuck-through-during-the-hockey-playoffs dept.

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.

7 of 309 comments (clear)

  1. They should be doing the opposite by Catamaran · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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    1. Re:They should be doing the opposite by jythie · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:They should be doing the opposite by jythie · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:They should be doing the opposite by Mr.+Slippery · · Score: 5, Informative

      So, are you ready to demonstrate, how copyrights have sniffled the development of Jazz, Rock-n-Roll, or Rap, for example?

      Famous Copyright Infringement Plagiarism cases in Music

      Music Lawsuits: Blurred Lines Thoughts

      HTH. HAND.

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    4. Re:They should be doing the opposite by Rob+Y. · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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    5. Re:They should be doing the opposite by itzly · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. Copyright extensions are pure scams by Rashkae · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.