Newly discovered jazz recordings show why copyright laws need to be revisited | Hacker News Reader

Newly discovered jazz recordings show why copyright laws need to be revisited

nytimes.com

52 pointsafschar27 comments

The thing that's just so frustrating about this is that this is our culture. Jazz (and its precursors) formed the foundations of pop, of rock, of rap. It's easy to think of culture as abstract concepts like our "freedom" or "ambition", but in the last century we've broadened our culture to be, in part, rooted in commercial entities. It's not bad, it's not good, it just is. The unfortunate effect though, as demonstrated by this find, is that we've permitted that part of our heritage to be legally locked away from us.

For many years there there have been no payment and effectively no limitations.

Sounds like you're thinking of patents.

No, he isn't. Copyright used to be 14 years, patents 17.

Patents were designed for a person to publicize their invention rather than using it secretly (see, e.g., forceps). Copyright was designed to give people an incentive to produce creative works, which would eventually be available to the public for free.

I'm curious, is there historical evidence of whether short-term copyright protection (14 years) allowed greater innovation in society than no copyright, or the current artist life + 70 (no doubt)? In an ideal legal system, what would be the best approach to copyright?

I don't think strict 14 year copyright was in effect anywhere where industrialized printing and reproduction was also extant.

On the other hand, there have been documented instances where simply ignoring copyright led to economic boom. There have been plenty of recent articles on that.

Hmm how would you know if simply ignoring copyright isn't just killing the goose for the golden eggs? If patents and copyrights really do promote innovation, you could be stunting innovation for the long term, even if you could put already-made discoveries to good use in the short term. It'd have been nice to see what specific examples of recent articles you're talking about.

I ran across an interesting piece which looks at history and the impact of copyright law. It contrasts England and Germany and looks at growth and publishing during the industrial revolution.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,...

Yes. The book "Against Intellectual Monopoly" details a significant number of cases dating as far back as the Statute of Anne and as recently as modern developing nations.

In every single case, the evidence shows that the absence of Copyright has spurred more creativity and cultural expression than its presence. Moreover, the shorter the Copyright, the greater the quantity of expression.

The original "Copyright Clause" from the US Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

I think we've strayed a bit far off the mark.

> Copyright laws are designed to ensure that authors and performers receive compensation for their labors without fear of theft and to encourage them to continue their work. The laws are not intended to provide income for generations of an author’s heirs, particularly at the cost of keeping works of art out of the public’s reach.

How are they not, when they're set at decades past the author's death? The Berne Convention mandates that all works other than photography and cinematography are to be copyrighted until at least 50 years past the author's death.

And as usual countries are free to go even further: the European "Copyright Directive" (2001/29/EC) extends it to 70 years (as does the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 in the US).

How is this anything but providing income for generations of an author's heir exactly?

Well for a start it gives the publishers some long term security to encourage investment. Imagine all rival record companies being able to press a work the moment the original author dies. More worryingly, imagine business rivals having a vested interest in the early death of artists...

> Imagine all rival record companies being able to press a work the moment the original author dies.

What's wrong with that? Isn't capitalism about free competition between businesses?

> More worryingly, imagine business rivals having a vested interest in the early death of artists...

Yeah right...

I think you missed my point which was that publishers will never make an initial investment if they feel it has no protection (or at least they will make less investment for less protection, which will eventually feedback to the artists investing less of their time for less reward). Furthermore, scouting for talent is one of the primary ways in which publishing businesses 'freely compete.'

But publishers, prior to local Copyright laws, were more than willing to make hefty investments, even without protection. In fact, they competed to make the best offer to artists and authors.

Read the book "Against Intellectual Monopoly." It details cases like this and more. See also links posted by others here, which detail similar cases.

Providing income for heirs is not unreasonable. Former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant did exactly that with his memoirs, which saved his family from poverty after his death [1].

That said, 70 years is still beyond excessive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_Ulysses_S._...

> Providing income for heirs is not unreasonable.

I am not saying anything about it being reasonable or not, I'm just pointing out that the article is obviously incorrect on that point.

The law could be changed without any effect to anybodies bottom line by making it mandatory to release in to the public domain any work that is no longer in print.

These aren't works from the 19th century. Some of the performers are still alive, and those who are not their estates are entitled to control over their output.

Why the hell should big outfits like Disney be the only ones with proper protection of their work?

It's obscene that articles like this promote the rape of the hard work done by small independent artists.

The article wasn't quite about rape. It was an opinion about existing copyright laws providing a barrier to broader society enjoying these culturally significant finds. No one is trying to get around existing copyright laws here; they're trying to comply with them as much as possible.

The broader aim of the piece, however, is a reevaluation of why we even have this problem in the first place. The Mickey Mouse Effect has stretched copyright into a position far different than what original copyright law set out to do: enable fair profit for a reasonable time, and then once that reasonable time has expired, open it up for the greater public good. Today we have effective perpetual copyright. The system is broken.

"rape of the hard work" ...?

They're literally not being heard at all right now, except by a very lucky few audio engineers at the museum.

A fixed license fee for orphan works like these would _always_ be a net positive, since they're starting from $0.

The entire premise of orphan works is a scam. The issue is not even of releasing the recordings for all to enjoy. It's of a company or organization wanting to sell works still in copyright without obtaining permission from the legitimate owners, compensating them, or even having to bother trying to find them.

Works owned by large corporations are never orphaned. It's only the small independent artists and their heirs that get shafted by this scam.

That's only because large corporations have so much existential inertia - it takes a long while to build a corporation up, and they tend to sink slowly enough that they leave evidence of where their IP goes.

That said, it's not too hard for corporate IP to become orphaned. A company makes a bad investment, gets bought out by another company that gets bought out by a third, and records get lost.

The article clearly states that a reasonable effort must be made to locate the owner of the work AND if the owner eventually comes forward that they would be able to claim a reasonable compensation. They wouldn't, however, be able to seek huge damages. Seems like common sense to me.

Reasonable efforts is not defined. Spending 5 minutes on the internet googling their name is a reasonable effort. So is spending 1 minute. So is spending 0 minutes and saying you tried your best.

But if I decide to reprint Disney works I get my ass sued off.

You guys support shafting small independent artists but have no problem with protections intact for large corporations with armies of lawyers.

"Claiming compensation" is another scam. It is set up as an "artists rights organization" taking royalties from the publisher. They then spend the money. If the artist later shows up, engages a lawyer to prove they are his works, and signs a contract with the rights organization giving up control over his work, then he gets to receive a percent out of what they have collected, which was a minuscule portion of the publisher's profit to begin with.

Why the fuck should the artist have to give up their rights to claim royalties for works they never authorized the publisher to sell? It's completely outrageous and those supporting this corporate fuckover of little guys are immoral assholes who should be shot in the head.

If you wish to use language like that in a way which does not enhance or support any point you are trying to make then please make your way to the comments section of digg or reddit. The rest of the grown-ups here don't need to hear it.

Sounds like someone needs to have a poke around techdirt.com for an afternoon.

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