Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Music Industry Faces Competition Complaint Over Public Domain Records
An anonymous reader writes: A Canadian record label specializing in public domain releases has filed a complaint with the Competition Tribunal over alleged anti-competitive conduct by Universal, Sony, and host of other music industry leaders. The complaint tells a fascinating behind-the-scenes tale, with the recording industry doing everything in its powers — including posting false reviews, pressuring distributors, and lobbying for changes to the law — to stop the sale of competing public domain records.
and it's called rent seeking
OK, yes I get that Canada is trying to change the law to extend copyright, but at least Canada, the EU, Japan and others actually have public domain music. I've mentioned this before and it's worth mentioning again I think. Did you know that thanks to the decision in Capitol Records vs. Naxos that in the USA it appears that nothing ever recorded is in the public domain in the USA right now? I'm not talking about song writing or music publishing, where older songs are indeed in the US public domain. I'm saying that every performance recorded from Edison on to the present age is still under copyright thanks to this court decision. Basically what happened is that Naxos tried to sneak a late 1930s classic music recording into the US market via their historical reissue CD label. The only problem was that in the US the performance was not only clearly still under copyright, the performance in question was owned in the US by Capitol Records and they had a CD on the market of it. Naxos got caught doing something they shouldn't have and rather than give in and admit their error, they tried to justify by arguing that an unclear US law actually made pre-1972 sound recordings already in the public domain, therefore they did nothing wrong. Not only the appeals court that got the case rule against Naxos, they basically made up the law and held that due to common law, every recording ever made was still under US copyright, no matter how old it was. Naxos couldn't really appeal this terrible and overreaching decision because they clearly broke US law, so it remains on the books and now there is no public domain currently in the US for musical performances. Please note that publishing and movies operate under different rules and things are actually in US public domain in those fields.
The copyright treaties define a shorter minimum copyright term for sound recordings than for other kinds of works. In some countries, if a song is written and recorded in the same year, the copyright in the composition expires 50 years after the death of the last surviving songwriter, but the copyright in the sound recording expires far earlier: 50 years after publication. This means someone can lawfully make and sell copies of any pre-1965 musical recording in those countries for only the cost of a license to the composition.
The United States is one huge exception. It applies the same 95-year copyright term to recordings published in 1972 or later as it does to any other work made for hire published in the same year. It also applies state copyright to pre-1972 sound recording copyright, and state copyright isn't subject to the "for limited Times" wording of the copyright clause of its constitution. Federal law has set a date after which state copyright must expire, but that's in 2067 to give them the equivalent of one full federal copyright term after the introduction of federal sound recording copyright.