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.
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone once posted some information about the average income for copyright holders past certain timeframes. IIRC, the average residual income for most performers after something like 20 years was very little, basically amounting to a few dollars per year. Let's face it -- Elvis Presley is the highest-paid dead performer, and the remaining Beatles and their estates may be collecting serious residuals, but they are by far the exceptions (and who really wants Yoko Ono to continue getting money off of Lennon's genius?). How much are Fine Young Cannibals making on residuals? Sister Sledge? 1910 Fruitgum Company? Those are Top 100 performers from 1989, 1979, and 1969, respectively. I expect they (or their survivors) are making their money either on the smaller tour circuits, or in professions that don't involve being on-stage.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
The existence of long-lived copyright corporations like Sony and Disney means artists (not just their descendants and other hangers-on) CAN profit - while living - from proceeds after their deaths. The rights to the music are more valuable now because of the revenue they are expected to generate in the future. Michael Jackson, for instance, might have to sell off the rights to his music to stay financially afloat. But if those rights were to perish with him, the companies who will soon be bidding for those rights would bid much less.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only are predictions over such long timeframes notoriously unreliable, but it's a self serving argument for extending copyright forever on dubious grounds: Simp
That's a very poor rationale (Score:3, Insightful)
This change of law increases the value of something already produced. I guess the copyright cartels are arguing that they are creating wealth, when really they're printing money. Further to that, the cost to society is not even considered.
This is yet another example of uncreative trolls, completely estranged from the artistic process, lining their pockets with silver.
Re: (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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Live? copyright already lasts for the author's entire lifetime, what's being discussed here is whether to continue protecting it for fifty or seventy years past that.
No, this isn't about the artists and has never been. It could be argued that this is about the artists' families, but practically no parent in this world supports his children financially until they're 50. This is simply the next step in the RIAA and MPAA's campaign to get their precious "infinity minus one" [wikipedia.org] copyright lenght in order to destroy the very idea of public domain.
Re: (Score:2)
Why the facade? We know that they're going to keep raising the length of copyright every 10 or so years indefinitely, so why not just skip the trouble and say copyright ownership lasts forever.
Heck, they could make it retroactive. It'd be fun to discover you're one of Mozart's kin and get a little cash.
The way to stop this (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem I have is not so much the copyright extension - it's the ex post facto fashion that it's being done. Changes to copyright law should not change the terms of existing copyrights.
Copyrights were originally an arrangement to promote public works by letting the creators have a monoply of copy rights on their works for a period of time (20 years originally) before the works become public domain.
It's a good idea, because by ensuring that the creators can profit from their works, society is enrichened with more works in the public domain (after the copyrights expire)
Can you imagine a deal where you pay for a number of years before you own your car, but then the car company changes the deal just before your term is up so you have to pay for another 5 years before you get your car?
Changing terms for EXISTING copyrights is, in effect, a similar situation - the artist knew the deal going in, there is already a clear 'no ex post facto law' ban in the constitution, and by never changing the term of existing copyrights, you limit the incentive to extend them until the heat-death of the universe!
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's less a matter of benefits and more a matter of staying power. In 50 years, do you think people will still be listening to Britney Spears, or that her music will be use in movies/TV shows?
If her albums are still being sold new, they'll see, what, maybe a thousand sales a year? At that rate, the theoretical public good would be better served by putting them into the public domain and letting people remix them freely.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And here I thought it was all for the benefit of the public. Silly me.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
In 70 years, Britney Spears would be extremely lucky to make the same sort of residuals as Billie Holiday would be making now.
The 70 year rule is ridiculous. If you do the net-present-value calculations, almost any money you make in a few decades is pretty much worthless. Almost all the profits come in the first few months even before interest rates. When you consider interest, the last few decades are worthless to the artist.
The only reason the 70 (or even 50) rule exists is to limit free alternatives. 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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, the 70 years doesn't even start running until after she's dead.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm no copyright lawyer, but isn't that whole After Death copyright clock only for written works (books, computer code, etc). I thought the clock for recordings started at the moment of first public performance or distribution.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The copyright terms are "life of creator plus x years." Also, there are different kinds of rights for performance, composition, etc. This does apply to songs as well. A quick google turned up this link: Copyright: Protecting Your Songs [ascap.com]
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Prince is still averaging an album every year and I'm pretty sure they are profitable. He is a far cry from Michael Jackson.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Prince is most certainly not living on old accomplishments. His commercial viability suffered in the late 1990s, but since then, he's released several albums that have sold very well (his last four have all been in the top 3 in the charts), went on a tour in 2004 that brought in nearly $90 million. He's still writing songs for other artists on top of all of that.
He may not be a friend of those in favor of copyright reform (he's about as much a copyright Nazi as Bono), but to suggest that he isn't busting his ass playing and creating music -- and doing so successfully -- is just flat wrong.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you naive enough to think Britney Spears owns the copyright to the music she performed?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (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.
I would be all for it with ONE revision (Score:3, Insightful)
... do not allow the transfer of Copyrights to other parties.
I suppose it wouldn't change much... the big music publishers would just place the artists into further eternal debt in order to continue to collect their money.
Re:I would be all for it with ONE revision (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
It certainly wouldn't. Everything would be handled purely by contracts. All it would do would double the size of the contracts artists sign.
Wow, this looks like it actually benefits artists! (Score:5, Informative)
..and the public.
According to the approved legislation, if producers, 50 years after the publication of a phonogram, do not make it available to the public, performers can ask to terminate the contract they signed to transfer their rights to the label.
That would SO never pass in the US.
Re: (Score:2)
Make the law absurd (Score:5, Insightful)
and that's how people will treat it. It tears down any pretext of respect.
Wheres my money!!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
I did some work years ago helping to build a commercial building. Several in fact..
I want a cut of their profits for the next 100 years!
They're stealing from me!
Virtual Property (Score:2)
What ever it takes to protect virtual property I guess.
That's okay (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I've reduced the copyright duration I'm willing to observe to 0 years.
How would you feel if your boss decided to do the same with your paycheck? Or are you trying to tell us that your work deserves compensation while the work of others does not?
That seems a little hypocritical to me. Maybe you have no idea how hard it is to learn a song for a performance let alone the effort it requires to write an arrangement of a piece of a completely new song from scratch.
If you only knew how much effort it takes, maybe you would actually respect the rights of others and be willing to
Re: (Score:2)
No, actually we are telling you that the method you are using to get paid is fucked. We have nothing against artists and scientist getting rewarded, but we do become somewhat pissed off if they decide that they will kick us in our collective faces, violate our basic rights, corrupt our politicians to get them to write laws defying bas
Re:That's okay (Score:4, Funny)
As soon as you demonstrate how the "intellectual property" crap is logically consistent with the fundamental properties of information, and thus basic physical characteristics of the Universe, I will stop taking pea-brained, cretin AC's like you for the hypocritical abusers of the Slashdot moderation system they are, with nothing whatsoever to contribute to the discussion and only existing to leave their smelly turds behind all over Slashdot as "proof" of their worthless existence.
Until then however ...
Re:That's okay (Score:4, Insightful)
I have done so many times here on Slashdot. To make it short: the concept of "private property" can be applied only to objects with certain physical characteristics, like a unique location in the space-time continuum, for example, amongst many others. Which restricts the idea basically to physical objects. Thus, say, a chair, can be "owned" (i.e. controlled) by a person, transferred (with a corresponding loss of control by the original "owner") to another person, etc and so on. Information lacks these properties. We do not even know its true nature, but what we do know is directly contradictory to the idea of "private property". For example, an integer number "5" is a singular (i.e. there is only one of those in existence in the entire Universe) entity, but which lacks a specific space-time continuum coordinates, and which at the same time can be present in minds of billions of people, encoded with an infinite number of different encoding systems on an infinite number of media, etc and so on. The same applies to any sequence of integers. So to say that a series of numbers has an "owner" would imply that somehow a person can "control" the integer numbers, God-like, in whatever ethereal dimension they exist. Which is clearly not the case. Information cannot be simply so restricted by humans. Furthermore, its other properties (like an ability to propagate infinitely) present additional departures from the idea of "private property". Since information can be transmitted (i.e. patterns are replicated) rather then "moved" (as it is with physical objects) in order to "control" it one has to supervise all transfer of information in order to restrict the "owned" kind, in any form, which is what the MPAAs and the like are attempting, without regard of the type of information being transmitted as all channels can contain the "owned" patterns. In short the idea of "intellectual property" and "total surveillance" or "thought control" are synonymous from the point of view of theory of information. But then again, information can propagate without transmission. Two people at the other ends of the planet can independently discover that 2+2=4. The view of the "intelectual property" demagogues is that the second person doing so, without ever being aware of the first one, is then a "thief". I could go on, but this should give you a general idea.
Clearly you have not been giving it much thought.
These are illogical. But some people use these phrases because they, intuitively, feel that something is seriously wrong with the whole concept of "intellectual property". Their instincts are correct, but they simply have not looked at the problem in depth.
No, it is nowhere that simple. This is the, patently and demonstrably incorrect, position of the "intellectual property" peddlers. The objective truth is that information can be "discovered" quite independently. In fact we do not know the true nature of information, as it appears to have a duality similar to that of, say, light, whereby at one time the light can be thought of as composed of discrete particles and at another time as a wave. Similarly, information can be "transmitted" and at some other times "discovered". And at the same time only one integer number 5 still exists in the Universe, thus making the idea of its "transmission" rather peculiar, giving to notions of multiple "impressions" or "representations" of the same uni
Re:That's okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of us Slashdotters do know how hard it is, how much effort it takes, to produce worthwhile creative content. Software is also under copyright, and there's plenty of us programmers here.
That's precisely why we cringe at laws such as this. It is hard, it does require effort, but it's nowhere near deserving lifetime compensation let alone extend that for 70 years after your death. As far as I'm concerned, the last person ever to deserve lifetime compensation for his work was a german patent officer for what was essentially a bunch of math and, as such, uncopyrightable.
Re:That's okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Paying for live performances is great, the money goes to the artist in exchange of their creativity and skill.
Paying for a performance more than once, and essentially, every time you experience it does not make sense. The artist does not make an effort every time someone hears their song.
I pay a car mechanic to fix my car and then stop. I don't continue paying them for the rest of my life despite the fact that I continue to enjoy their effort.
Yes, the artist may invest a lot of time and effort in their creation, and that's why they get money from every member of the audience, for each audience they perform to.
A recording of a performance is not a performance.
I know this may sounds harsh. The monetization of everything has created laws that don't make sense, like IP laws. The nature of IP is not material and unlike physical matter, IP is very difficult to fence off and contain. Artists are made successful by their audience, the general public.
If not for the endlessly greedy corporations still standing between creators and their audience, things could be much simpler, with shorter copyright terms, clear ownership for every piece of media we buy and the ability to share the stuff we like.
It is not mandatory for every successful artist to become a millionaire. Many programmers, writers, painters, inventors do create useful and beautiful works and never become very rich.
An idea or a tune may pop in more than one head at the same time. Calling it "mine" and trying to fence it off and make everyone else pay is ridiculous.
Re:That's okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that's exactly the way it works for me. I don't get "residuals" on the work I do. The second I stop working, I stop getting paid too, I don't continue receiving money for my work for the rest of my life, despite the fact that it will still be benefitting my employer.
Those who support copyright are asking for a different standard, not the same, as everyone else gets. If you are employed to do something, you continue getting paid as long as you continue the work and no longer. If you want to get paid into your retirement, either ask for a pension as a condition of your employment (at which you may not be successful) or save and invest money during your working years.
If, on the other hand, you go into business for yourself, you must continually market and sell the products you offer. And if someone comes up with a technology that means you no longer can make money the way you once did? Tough. Find a new way to sell, find a new product, or file Chapter 11.
Copyright is an artificially created monopoly. Its like does not exist for anyone else. I don't continue to profit from my work after it's done and sold to someone. I don't get to tell people not to share it without slipping me cash. I don't get to tell them they can't tinker with it and improve it. That's the way it should be.
Removing copyright would simply level the playing field. Ideas aren't inherently scarce. If you can make money off selling them, or performing certain types of them, or coming up with them for people who enjoy your work, good on you. (People do sell bottled water, and water, at least in the US, is not inherently scarce and is effectively free, so it can work). If not, go find something else to do, and get paid in the same way on the same terms all the rest of us do. Quit whining that you have a "right" to a profit from doing anything at all. You have a right to try. You do not have a right to tell people they cannot share in an attempt to profit from something they could've replicated on their own.
Re: (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: (Score:2)
That's OK. We'll just increase the maximum penalty for piracy again, and lobby to make it a criminal offence.
Sincerely, the RIAA.
so how does that promotes creativity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Current social structure won't be capable of maintaining that kind of endless resource redirection. This copyright and intellectual property nonse will have to end someday, and it's not gonna be nice for anyone.
Harmony (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
70 years in the United States? Yeah, back at the turn of the 20th century. Toward the end of the 20th, the Sonny Bono copyright act extended copyright in the United States to more than a century.
Just check wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Re:Harmony (Score:4, Informative)
70 years in the United States? Yeah, back at the turn of the 20th century. Toward the end of the 20th, the Sonny Bono copyright act extended copyright in the United States to more than a century.
Just check wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Read your own link. Grandparent is correct about the length of copyright. Sonny-Bono extended the duration of copyright from fifty years after the death of the author to seventy years after the death of the author. Assuming most authors live thirty years or more after they publish a given work, this will often amount to a century or more of copyright, yes. (This is all ignoring works that are written anonymously, pseudonymously, by multiple authors, unpublished, etc.)
However, the summary makes it clear that this isn't seventy years p.m.a., it's seventy years from the date of the performance, and only applies to performances: "So performers will collect for 20 more years from the date of performance; composers' rights already extend to 70 years beyond their deaths." I don't know what the law is in the U.S. right now on duration of copyright for performances, or whether this harmonizes with it at all.
In 1900, by the way, the maximum length of copyright was 28 years from first publication, nowhere close to 70 years. In 1909 it was 56 years, still less than 70. According to, again, your own link.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The US already grants copyright up to 70 years after the author's death.
The EU has extended the rights of the performers, not the authors. The US does not grant comparable rights to performers at all.
Needs approval of every single member state (Score:5, Interesting)
Very appropriate fortune... (Score:2)
Corruption (Score:2)
I always knew corruption is legal in America, but now it seems it's also legal here in Europe. How else can normal thinking people come up with this? No one but the likes of the RIAA/MPAA benefit from this.
I have a theory that every government has a cellar full of lockers somewhere for the politicians to leave their brains before entering parliament.
they have it backwards (Score:2)
Artificial scarcity does NOT promote science and the useful arts! Let's pray our lawmakers eventually legislate a way for IP rights holders to profit from their creations without creating artificial scarcity. This philosophy has caused countless deaths due to its affects on generic drugs.
Re: (Score:2)
You're thinking of patents. No one has ever died because the drug they needed was copy-righted.
What does this mean? (Score:5, Funny)
From the fine article: Composers already enjoy copyright protection for 70 years after their death.
Does that mean composers have even more fun in heaven, or the fire in hell is turned down a bit for them?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It means they're earning money even while decomposing.
Bert
(derivative joke stolen from Roger von Oech)
And the original one was .. 50? (Score:2)
Classical No Longer Exists (Score:3, Insightful)
Disney and others will suddenly find themselves fighting a loosing war against completely unique Movies, Music, Animation and every other forms of art. Instead of realizing that Walt Disney could possible be remembered for a thousand years by providing a seed to future innovation, they will regard him as a greedy twentieth century materialist that offered nothing for people of the twenty-first century and beyond.
The dark ages provided a clean break and the new age of reasoning. It's quite likely that the arrogance of the artists of today will lead to another age of which they have no part.
William D Howell Sr
"Memory is Fleeting, Inspiration Eternal"
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.
5 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (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.
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
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?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry but patents and copyright are completely different things. Why do you have so little respect for creative works? Is it because you have no talent or creativity of your own or are you too damn lazy to try to create something new?
I write and record music, mostly for my own amusement. I have uploaded some of my stuff on the internet for friends and strangers to check out. I would never ever dream of charging anyone anything to listen to my music. When I need money, I go to work just like anyone else. I would never expect people to support my livelihood just because I spent a couple of hours of my time writing a tune.
If you ever had to prepare for a performance you might have some respect for the arts. As a spectator it must seem easy to you. I assure you that it is not easy and a good live performance can take hours of practice over a period of months to get right.
You are mixing the performing of music with the recording of music. Performing artists should rightly be paid for their
Seems to me like (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems to me like it's less about the originator of works making lots more money, than preventing anyone but the originator of the works from making any money.
Though the talk about "audiovisual" has me thinking. Are movie scripts/ideas counted as audiovisual, or simply printed works? Cause we all know the movie business loves to redo all movies that have been successful every few decades.
Time to cut out the middlemen (Score:2, Interesting)
Go back to the statute of anne in Europe (Score:3, Informative)
14 years.
The US constitution had a similar copyright law from 1789 to 1909, 14 years + 14 year extension if requested, and you had to file for the copyright and the extension no reward for laziness.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creative arts not to make heirs and corporations wealthy.
In today's world... (Score:3, Insightful)
Optimal Copyright Duration (Score:4, Informative)
According to this paper [repec.org], optimal copyright duration is 14-15 years.
The Biggest Pirates of Them All (Score:5, Insightful)
The IPI and other industry groups like to talk about the billions lost to piracy on the internet. But what they've done here dwarfs that. When you copy a song in violation of copyright you "steal" it once from one person or one company for a few years or however long goes by until you delete it or lose the disk its saved on.
But what has happened here is that the industry groups have stolen every single song written or recorded in the last 70 years from every single citizen of the EU for a duration of at least 20 whole years. The scale of their theft is many orders of magnitude greater than the worst case scenario for "internet piracy."
As far as I'm concerned, any rights owner that supports or benefits from any copyright term extension legislation has zero standing to complain about piracy. They broke the social contract that was in place when they created the music. Just because they have co-opted our so-called representatives to put a rubber-stamp of legality on their contract violation doesn't give them the moral high-ground in the conflict. They want new terms? Well, the only terms they deserve are a termination of their copyrights, termination with extreme prejudice.
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.
Oh noez ... does that mean? (Score:3, Funny)
Sound copyright extended to perpetuity (Score:5, Funny)
With the conviction of The Pirate Bay administrators having immediately abolished all filesharing, the EU has approved an extension of sound copyright to seventy years past the point of theoretical death, and death to seventy years past actual death [today.com].
The media industry sponsored move is intended to properly suppress the very notion of the production of unapproved works of art. The major record companies' value proposition has changed from being the only people you can get music from to being the only people who will stop you getting music. "We own all the back catalogs we've been buying up," said Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfmann, the luckiest sperm in the whole USA, "and YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM! And we'll sue your grandmother's ass if you try going around us!"
Without an extension of copyright, the dead might never record again. "If I'd known in 1958, when the copyright in 'Move It' was due to expire in 2008, that the copyright in 'Move It' would in fact expire in 2008, would I have bothered? I don't bloody think so!" said Sir Cliff Richard (died 1961). "I can rest safe in the knowledge that my mouldering corpse will not feel ripped off by this turn of events, and that my many, many descendants can continue to live off 'Summer Holiday' for the term of their rather unnatural lives. Remember that I am a born-again Christian and non-drinker, so beer and hookers mean and meant nothing to me. Money, however, is next to Godliness."
Feargal Sharkey of UK Music stressed the necessity of the move to his never having to write another song after "Teenage Kicks." "I urge you to picture a world in which Girls Aloud and Jason Donovan have no motivation to record."
The government's Cowell Report recommended that copyright should be reduced to one year, software patents made a hanging offence, Mickey Mouse declared an unperson and musicians told to stop whining and get a real bloody job like the rest of us. "It's not like there's some sort of national shortage of bad pop records," said Sir Simon, "although a world in which Jive Bunny recordings irretrievably disintegrate into dust before they could possibly enter the public domain does have a certain appeal. Nevertheless, we desperately need to demotivate surplus pop star wannabes. I urge you to picture a world in which Girls Aloud and Jason Donovan have no motivation to record."
Richard Dawkins spoke in favour of the perpetual unavailability of music, as per his new book The Art Delusion. "'Music' appears to be an entirely subjective phenomenon with little or no objective measurements possible — much like any other brand of snake oil or balderdash. Music seems to be a sort of virus on human consciousness, parasitically sapping the collective intelligence of the human race." He defended his own attendance at his local church's Christmas carols: "I'm only putting them at their ease so they let their guard down while I work on plans for mass re-education camps for the sufferers of musical appreciation."
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: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.
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems the media industry has much stronger political influence than the people.
Industry has always had stronger political influence than the people. It's just more obvious when industry actually disagrees with the people.
Re: (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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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,
But industry organizations are also fundamentally different than real people. Real people care more about the local hospital that might be closed down because it affects them directly, while the industry cares about the health care reform bill that'll let them charge 300 million people a little more. Consumer organizations don't have nearly the same strength because people constantly abandon it for other short-time and personal benefits.
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:Potatoes and patents (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Monsanto has already done this with farmers [usatoday.com] using some of their seeds. Monsanto has even gone after farmers who don't use Monsanto seed, but get cross-pollinated [sourcewatch.org] from crops that do use the engineered seed.
And BTW...toss out the "Dan Quayle does Spelling" book. It's 'potato' :) (had
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 Pe
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I would prefer copyright was similar to patent rights. 17..20 years should be sufficient time for the Autists to be fully compensated.
But it is... (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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, Insightful)
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer - like at most 5 years after the death of the performer. This to avoid weird situations where someone dies during recording or soon after and also to make sure that funeral costs may be paid.
As for movies with several actors - the last one will die eventually.
And also make sure that copyright can only be held by a person and not a company or other organization.
And last - no copyright for works that are related to a religion.
The ability to drain money from people for some old creation that already has made the bulk of money is just annoying and disgusting.
OK, it may cause some sick situations where a company can keep someone "alive" for several years just to get their dirty hands on copyright money!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer
Copyright should have no ties to the death of the performer. All works should share equal protection. If a performer wants income for life they should invest their money, set up a pension, etc. and/or continue performing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Some performers aren't recognized until they have died - like Franz Kafka.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What exactly is your point?
There is no obligation to ensure that a works value is recognized within its term of copyright. Again, if you want to profit from your work financially market it while it is under copyright protection. And, again, we shouldn't hold up one or two exceptions to set a standard that applies to every creative work brought into existence. To do so literally robs society of access to works in public domain.
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Insightful)
How on earth would extending the copyright help those artists? How would it promote culture for the common good?
If they aren't recognized until after they're dead -- they're still dead and penniless.
Re: (Score:2)
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer - like at most 5 years after the death of the performer. This to avoid weird situations where someone dies during recording or soon after and also to make sure that funeral costs may be paid.
This is a really bad idea, the law should not encourage murder. The current law gets away with it only because the material will probably be lost in 70 years.
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, if copyright were tied to death + only a short time, JK Rowling would be toast. All the publishing houses would be hiring professional hitmen. And striking it big with the Great American Novel would pretty much be your death knell.
On the other hand, that sound like a good setting for some kind of post-apocalyptic copyright thriller.
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite the opposite. If her death reverted her works to the public domain, anybody could then publish them, so her publishers would no longer get a juicy slice of her copyright-protected works, as they do now.
Re: (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
Re:Fuck. (Score:5, Insightful)
cd Music/
mv Jamendo ~
cd
rm -rf Music/*
mv Jamendo/ Music/
Join Jamendo folks. Search, find, advertise, and promote the musicians on there. Any musician from the labels is either clueless or trying to fuck you over. That the bands that I grew up with, supported, lived with, showed me beauty, tears and life can support this situation guts me. Spineless little fucks they have become. Delete your music folks, delete your movies. If you see or hear something you like from them then email them asking for their album/movie/whatever under creative commons. Our failure to do this with lead to the death of our culture and the emotional death of ourselves. Subsumed in the search for more and more money.
If the RIAA and it's members want my remorse. It can turn it's body to a corpse.
Re:Why is copyright bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
How the hell did we ever let copyrights become transferable?
You wanna stop all this shit? Return all copyrights the the actual owners. The music industry would be destroyed overnight and this bullshit would end with it.
Re:Why is copyright bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason copyright is bad is that it promotes the loss of humanity's works of art. In the last 70 years, there was a world war and plenty of local wars around the world, and now a lot of people have nukes. People regularly blow up buildings, companies go out of business, even whole countries disappear from the map regularly. The only way to ensure that art is preserved for the next 70 years is to copy, copy, copy.
Re:Why is copyright bad? (Score:4, Informative)
You should probably start here: philosophy of copyright (consequentialist theories) [wikipedia.org]. Actually, the whole article is probably worth a read.
There are multiple rationales for copyright. You seem to believe in the natural rights of the author and their heirs to control the uses of the work. Wikipedia mentions that the cases you present are related to the concept of personality rights [wikipedia.org].
In the United States, the U.S. Constitution gives the rationale of "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" [wikipedia.org]. The view you reference is that that means copyright is a sort of loan from the public to the creator(s) and that copyright exists purely to allow creative works to be sold for a long enough period of time to ensure their creation is sufficiently profitable for it to actually happen -- and no more. That is, copyright is far from being a natural right: it is a necessary evil that should be minimized as much as possible without damaging the creation of new works.
From that perspective, the question is not "Why is copyright bad?" but "Why is copyright good?" based on the belief that all limitations on personal liberty need to be justified.
Re:Insightful? (Score:5, Informative)
Highlighting shared sentiment? Copyright is after all the balance of artist income and value to society through public works. If society at large believes there to be no balance then the gp was insightful.
Re:Insightful? (Score:5, Funny)
So some moron can make a completely idiotic post and just add "Go ahead burn my karma" and that suddenly makes it insightful?
Not only that, his copyright on his post won't expire until 70 years after he finally dies.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nevertheless, these actions must be accounted for in a court of law. This means sacred cows will be sacrificed on the court of public opinion, and pimps and thieves will run free. Hunter S. Thompson would be proud.
Re:Insightful? (Score:5, Funny)
(...) with specific regard to industry charlatans who claim to represent the wishes of the people to be frogs.
I'm French, you insensitive Claude!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It changes a lot for the company still making tons of money selling Elvis. They can continue to do so for another 20 years, while they work on the next extension.