Music Copyright In EU Extended To 70 Years 395
rastos1 writes "The European Parliament extended the copyright in the EU for the performers of musical works from 50 to 70 years. The legislation will be reviewed in 3 years. The European Commission will consider extending the scope to audiovisual works too." So performers will collect for 20 more years from the date of performance; composers' rights already extend to 70 years beyond their deaths. Update: 4/26 at 12:15 GMT by SS: Reader rimberg points out that while the copyright extension was passed in the European Parliament, it is now being held up in the Council of Ministers awaiting further debate on the issue.
Needs approval of every single member state (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with copyright... (Score:1, Interesting)
70 years is a long time. I agree, it's fine, provided it's limited to commercial distribution. But, perhaps, it should be legal, beyond fair use, to share videos after a given number of years without fear of reprisal?
So, maybe between 30 and 70 years, it should be legal to share, but not profit, from others' works.
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. Many of us will be dead before the works our parents enjoyed before our conception enter the public domain.
It seems the media industry has much stronger political influence than the people. Something has gone very, very wrong with copyright law. The value society now takes from offering artists the protection of copyright is now extraordinarily questionable.
If these industry groups were so concerned with the future of their artists they shouldn't be calling for 70-year long copyright terms, they should be offering artists a pension.
5 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Who will know who Britney Spears was some 20 years from now? I suspect that most people aren't even aware that it was her music that was played.
She is known for other things than music and when her possible sex appeal has diminished she will (luckily?) be forgotten.
There are way too many teenage band/performers around that are disappearing quickly in history.
And how many remember "Carl Anderson and Gloria Loring" who made place 13 at the top list of 1986? Or "Patti Labelle and Michael McDonald" that made number 4? I had to look it up.
Someone more known is Gloria Estefan, but nothing of importance has been heard from her in a lot of years either.
Very few has the potential of Madonna to really make a statement and tell people to F off when necessary.
Then we have those real weird guys Michael Jackson and Prince (a.k.a. The Symbol and whatever) that may have made popular music once, but now are just living on old accomplishments. And they are mostly known today by their statements and/or their looks.
Time to cut out the middlemen (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Classical No Longer Exists (Score:5, Interesting)
"The beauty is that a hundred years from now they will actually laugh at the fools that expect you to pay to watch the crap of the past century."
It probably won't unfold that way. The works will fall out of fashion--all the quicker because fewer people will make derived works due to cost--and this will cause them to be forgotten entirely. In the future, even if a song has been entirely forgotten and no one even knows who to contact for the copyright to the song it won't be able to be used in, say, a documentary because no one will take the chance of a lawsuit when a copyright holder finally steps forward. And this is how culture dies. Locked away in a lawyers file cabinet.
Re:Fuck. (Score:3, Interesting)
Try "powerful people have always had more political influence than people without power." Not too likely to change, either, until humans stop having human nature,
Re:5 years (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with patents are different.
The patent tradeoff was that if you tell us how you did it completely, we'll provide protection for a duration. US duration is 17 years max.
The big problem is that lawyers have taken off in this regard and destroyed the "how to do" part, so that they get the protection without full disclosure. Well... that problem and allowing math and living creature patents.
Re:Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
They don't want to pay current artists a fair cut. They want to kill the public domain, so we need to keep churning out new works.
No, they want to kill the public domain so that they can chunk out more old works (old as in already-payed-for) from their archives when they have a temporary drought of big selling albums. And for Christmas, when old people buy their record. (Old people buy something like one record per year, on average.)
Old people might also like to pay for tailor-made radio services that play all their oldie favorites. All this could add up to a decent amount of money for an old record giant. Especially if it is powered by the same P2P technology that they have fought so hard to outlaw. P2P would remove the need for big server farms that distribute the music.
Public funding of drugs better than patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Patents are a disaster. Economist David Levine has a catalog of devastating evidence and arguments. David Heller writes that "Almost half of patents litigated to judgment are invalidated; of those found valid, half are found not to be infringed." Just think of the costs of that for a moment. Most inventions are small and incremental, not original and earth-shattering. And if you're the little guy, forget about it: if RIM couldn't fight off bogus patent threats, what hope do little guys have?
But the real scandal is the drug industry.
Right now we have drug companies that:
This is what they do with the profits from patents. These guys are the big tobacco of the 21st century. Please tell me why paying monopoly rents for drugs from a corrupt industry that's not particularly interested in saving lives is better than at-cost drugs researched with public funding.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
It turns out that the 70 year extension is worse for artists since the recording companies can now bill the artist more in preservation charges and other made up funny charges. I suspect it will be very difficult to find a single artists that this will help.
There is no right to patent laws (Score:4, Interesting)
Listen to yourself. This is hysterical. You don't make a single cogent argument. You don't even respond to my proposal for public funding.
Let's be clear, because your example is insidious. It implies that eliminating patent law would be akin to seizing personal property. If I own a knife, then it is my personal property. So long as I don't break any laws, it is mine to do with as a I choose. Anyone proposing to ban it or take it away from me must have a significant justification.
Patents are nothing like this. They are a policy instrument used by government to achieve certain ends. A government choosing not to make use of them is not a matter of "banning" anything. Patents are only legitimate and useful to the extent that they achieve the objectives they are intended to achieve. You do not have a right to patent laws. This is merely a question of choosing the right tool for the job.
The question, then, is first: do patents do what they're supposed to do, and second: is there a better tool for the job. I referred to economist David Levine. He answers "no" to the first, and provides a convincing array of evidence. As to the second, I have pointed to another tool that works better. Public funding of research is not known for the kind of thorough corruption evidenced in the proprietary pharmaceutical sector. And because it is not dependent on patents, the benefits of drugs are not subject to the huge additional costs of monopoly.
But hey, since you made a ridiculous comparison I'll make one too. With a choice between a knife and a chainsaw to cut vegetables, would you choose the chainsaw even though you kept losing fingers?
Rock'n'roll (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder if this copyright extension has to do with the fact that the popular fifties music (rock'n'roll, for example) was starting to get out of the 50 year copyright zone.
Proportions? (Score:5, Interesting)
A pharmaceutical company that pours billions of dollars into research and tials to finally develop a drug that takes away disease gets a 20 year patent.
An automaker that develops new type of breaks that saves peoples lives gets a 20 year patent.
Someone who goes "la la la" into a microphone gets 70 year copyright.
Yes, I know that patents and copyright aren't exactly the same but still. The proportions are WAY off here.
Re:Why is copyright bad? (Score:2, Interesting)
You are right that software patents are the bigger evil. However, I think a lot of the injustice that people feel about what's happening in the copyright world is that it spells out so obviously the corruption that has come to play to achieve what is happening. Corruption that has little to do with benefitting the full range of society, but only those who already have a lot of power.
A lot of the people that read this list probably quite like the idea of the potential of running some small software business and all forms of corruption that increase the ability to large companies to oppress upcoming small companies is abhorrent to them.
I once had a company that someone wrongly used the DCMA law, claiming my software was theirs, to take the software out of circulation for a year. After a debilitating year of legal costs and no income the court found that the copyright was my own, but the company was destroyed in the meantime. Where's the justice in that? These sort of laws become tools for large players to wipe out small, pesky upstarts.
If you are a small software company with a great idea, you better get bigger and amass enough capital to sustain a court battle very quickly, or sooner or later someone will try and eliminate you from the race via these laws and it won't matter much if you are right or not, it's just a tool.
Potatoes and patents (Score:5, Interesting)
* If I buy an original potatoe at a store and I reproduce it and share copies with my friends, why isn't that called theft? Making that initial potatoe available can potentially cost the store thousands in lost potatoe sales.
(... sampled from the swedish debate)
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Interesting)
What right does an artist have to 70 years of income from a single piece of work? What makes an artist so much more special than a doctor or even a supermarket shelf stacker?
If a doctor save's someone's life, is he entitled to royalties from that person for as long as they remain alive?
As you pointed out, most artists don't get rich, but a small percentage of them take the piss and make billions for doing relatively little work. The difference has nothing to do with how hard someone works, or even how good their music is, it's purely down to brand recognition and media hype.
Why should someone who performs his work every week in a bar earn less than someone who hasn't performed or produced anything in years?
The system is unfairly stacked to benefit a select few at the expense of everyone else, and these people have pulled the wool over the eyes of the masses by convincing them they somehow have some inherent right to continue ripping everyone off.
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bear in mind as well that most contract with artists were sign when 50 years was the law so the contract will state they get royalties for 50 years. The extra 20 years royalties is going straight to the label in most cases and the artist won't see a penny.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because it will benefit a very small number of greedy people at the expense of everyone else, and these people have enough money to influence the politicians.
All it will do, is ensure that more wealth flows out of the economy and into the private vaults of a very small number of people. And because of the 70 year term, it will ensure that a lot of work is lost to society as it has been completely forgotten, all copies of it lost and everyone who remembers it is dead by the time copyright expires.
Re:That's okay (Score:3, Interesting)
If my boss decides to pay me 0, i will stop working for him... So long as i continue working, i should continue being paid for my work. Why should artists be any different? Keep performing, keep getting paid. Stop performing, stop getting paid.
Should i have the right to continue demanding money from my boss 70 years after i have stopped working for him?
Re:Potatoes and patents (Score:3, Interesting)
* If I buy an original potatoe at a store and I reproduce it and share copies with my friends, why isn't that called theft? Making that initial potatoe available can potentially cost the store thousands in lost potatoe sales.
cough cough Monsanto
It's purpose is too obvious ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Artist collection agencies, like Sabam [gowildchild.com] gets money from all the artists, dead or alive, which they've got their exclusive contract with.
To my opinion, it's purpose is not to protect the artist, but those who collect afterwards....
I've been writing about this exclusive-licensing-crap limiting our (Belgian) artists at large.
Be sure to check out Sabam, really for the common? [gowildchild.com] & Music industry, wake up call for alternative licensing! [gowildchild.com] for more information...
Re:Potatoe and Patent. (Score:3, Interesting)
Better check with Dan Quayle to see if he has the rights to Potatoe.
Meanwhile, I feel like there's a Judo move being set up here.
For a little bit of early pain, we're establishing the groundwork for copyright enforcement.
Maybe not this administration, but eventually someone with a populist streak *with nothing to lose* - say a President in his last year in office, could then do a tombstone piledriver on Hollywood Accounting using the fiscal reform laws.
I'm thinking that Mr. Scientist just has to add some Performance Coating and get BOTH a patent AND a copyright on his ideas. "Ooh, it's a CD with Extended Data features! In a story about a scientist who seeks to get past the limits of silicon on a computer chip, he desperately tries higher grade lithography, before changing paradigms, and turning to the new photo-sensitive materials in that other slashdot post 2 stories away on the front page."
Get a drama class to film things, write up a script and novel version, get a soundtrack, post it as a webisode and a Community-TV special, and Voila, Copyright lock.
Re:THOSE publishing houses (Score:3, Interesting)
You're forgetting one important thing: derivative works. Sure, Rowling's publishers wouldn't want to bump her off, because they'd lose their monopoly. And the existing books wouldn't be worth a whole lot. It would be about like re-publishing Victor Hugo or Jane Austen
But we're talking about the ability to make MOVIES while Potter is still hot, and churn out scads of sequels with an army of sweatshop writers (and since it's a collaborative work, we'll just give it to the corp., which means it gets a tidy 95-year copyright, regardless of whom you kill). So while I was being a little tongue-in-cheek, there ARE really big financial incentives, especially if you are guaranteed the ability to cash in while a craze is still hot.
Also, you only go to prison if you get caught. That's why you hire a professional. If they can't catch him, they can't catch you.