EU votes to extend music copyright to 70 years
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I can see the court in Brussels going, "Mm, yes. I know what will motivate them to create better music! We'll make sure they own it when they are 105 years old! There's just too little good music these days, and this will make all the difference."
Joking. Obviously it's special interests pushing to make money from their 1950s creations after having been incentivized enough to make them in the first place, at the expense of the public.
Look at Disney and don't tell me that a lack of copyright makes creativity. A lack of copyright just enables corporations to mass produce drivel from non-copyrighted works and cut out the talented people. Disney is barely a step away from just an algorithm that creates film scripts from Brothers Grimm stories.
There's other ways to handle the music labels than abolish copyright.
Copyright is about the government stopping other people from using a work without permission of the copyright holder, not about identifying whose work something is.
If I recorded a song in 1961, that recording would go out of copyright this year under the previous regime.
The rights and wrongs of lengthy copyright protection are a separate issue, but the differential treatment of different artistic forms is something I feel should be addressed. This is a step towards equalisation (not full equalisation but a lot less controversial and so easier to enact), and for that I'm thankful.
Nor is it clear that different countries and different media should have the same rules in the first place.
The problem is it would be like any one of the entrepreneurs on HN being told in X-many years that "Sorry, you lived too long so your company is being taken from you, you'll no longer receive any profit from it and it IS NOT being purchased from you at a fair market value. Sucks to be you.
Copyright is one of the most difficult issues we have, because almost anyone who has worked to make their own money be it entrepreneur, writer, musician, etc. would think it abhorrent that they could eventually be forced to give up their work that may still hold a reputable value on the market be forcibly given up for economic loss. It's quite frankly absurd.
Then you have organizations like the RIAA and MPAA who act on behalf of mega-corps that have conglomerated thousands of peoples work under themselves and keeps those artists trapped with huge debts, lengthy record contracts, etc. The RIAA does to musicians what Monsanto does to farmers. They're elephants throwing their weight around in a pen full of guinea pigs, and its hard to see these corporations as anything but evil and greedy. Basically because all they are are evil and greedy.
Then you have the legislators who all have a lot of green mysteriously slipped into their pockets, and they claim to be pro-business and support copyright because it helps the little guy. Whilst the little guy is generally unable to be helped because they're firmly squashed beneath an elephants feet.
The problem gets really complex when an authors children starts making legitimate derivative works, because then the series as a whole needs to be kept in copyright to enforce the derivative works clause. So who decides what would be a legitimate derivative work to extend copyright to the end of the child's life, and what isn't so the material has a chance to re-enter the market and not be killed off by the Estates greed.
Personally I believe copyright should be 20 years on a work and in case of a series it should be 20 years for the whole from the date of the latest derivative work. Basically, if an author or their estate haven't produced a derivative in 20 years, then it's time to shit or get off the pot. As a writer I don't think this would be harsh, it might encourage creativity and discourage people trying to make Hollywood sales on everything they make.
Why would it be? Copyright was initially supposed to bring betterment to society, not even more wealth to successful artists. How does extending performer rights by 20 years improve society as a whole?
> Authors get to, musicians don't
Compositors already did. They're musicians. Performers did not.
> The problem is it would be like any one of the entrepreneurs on HN being told in X-many years that "Sorry, you lived too long so your company is being taken from you, you'll no longer receive any profit from it and it IS NOT being purchased from you at a fair market value.
No, no it would not.
> Personally I believe copyright should be 20 years on a work and in case of a series it should be 20 years for the whole from the date of the latest derivative work. Basically, if an author or their estate haven't produced a derivative in 20 years, then it's time to shit or get off the pot.
That's a highway to even worse abuse than the current system (which in the fullness of time will already reach infinite copyright duration).
> As a writer I don't think this would be harsh, it might encourage creativity.
How? A new release with half a paragraph changed would already be a derivative. Have you even seen how many times Lucas has "remastered" star wars?
Also, your proposed 20 years copyright + 20 years extensions for derivatives would make it trivial to extend copyright indefinitely by producing a trivial derivative at 19 years. It could even be automated. I think it would be better to fix the derivative works clause so such a work is copyrighted on its own.
Also, you don't seem to have a clue what a derivative is. A derivative work is a whole new work based on the original copyright and that original material being necessary for the derivative work. Sequels/prequels/whatever are derivatives, an edited edition is not. I don't get what's so hard for people to grasp about that.
The copyright could be structured so that the copyright does lapse, but in the existence of derivative works the derivative copyright is extended, giving protection from someone writing an unauthorized sequel as long as the new material is in copyright.
First, according to the Wikipedia entry on derivative work, "[...]The Mona Lisa With a Moustache. Often used by law professors to illustrate legal concept of derivative work." seems to suggest that producing a derivative work is indeed trivial. Copyright doesn't care if anyone would actually want to consume the work.
Also, why is it that protecting derivative works would automatically mean that the original needs protection as well? While you're preparing the 21st edition of your annual comic series, I make one that is a derivative of your first edition (now out of copyright). Sure, it's inconvenient for you, but I can't pretend to be "the real thing" as your trademark is certainly still covered. The fan-fiction universe seems to suggest such a "parallel" universe can exist without anyone mistaking one for the other.
> Sure, it's inconvenient for you, but I can't pretend to be "the real thing" as your trademark is certainly still covered.Sure, it's inconvenient for you, but I can't pretend to be "the real thing" as your trademark is certainly still covered.
Actually yes you can, it's virtually impossible to trademark a name and it would be easy to fool untold thousands by publishing an eighth Harry Potter and simply leave out the authors name. This then lands the pressure on book sellers to vet the works they sell to ensure a work is a legitimate sequel so as not to damage their own profits by selling inferior knockoffs.
> The fan-fiction universe seems to suggest such a "parallel" universe can exist without anyone mistaking one for the other.
Because a crudely written story on some fanfic board is really going to confuse consumers in a bookstore or on Amazon. Seriously, it's absurd claiming people don't mistake the two when you'll never see the two together in the first place. You'll never see fanfic anywhere but backwater sites because when people start making money off of it, the person will be screwed beyond belief. People get raped by the RIAA for allegedly costing them money; imagine what lawyers can do when they can prove you cost them money by having a record of your sales.
This is a false analogy. It is not the company that would be taken but the right to copy it's products that were produced, and sold X years ago. Put another way, we don't allow artists only X years to produce work and then acquire them as vassals of the state. Moreover the value of works for an artist when that work falls out of copyright is not normally zero unless it was approximately zero at the start; an artist can still perform the work and get paid particularly if that work was deemed by society to be of cultural value.
Why is this fair? Why would a copyright term of 20 years max be fair? Because it's a deal. The state provides monopoly protection in exchange for release into the public domain after the stated period. If you don't want to take the deal then you can keep your works private.
No, it would be the products sold today. Copyright doesn't expire once a work stops being sold. The reason a change has been made is because the works are still being sold in a large enough volume that people stand to loose enough money to lobby government to protect.
Perhaps not taking your company, but when they're taking your product and profitability, they're certainly taking away your production lines. Who isn't going to buy the entire discography of the Rolling Stones for $10 when the band is still charging a fortune per album.
Part of the copyright deal is that we, the people, provide a framework of legal protections on the understanding that works are released in to the public domain. As with patents, copyright from the public perspective is about encouraging innovation and creation but also about ultimately freeing ideas and creations for the public use.
It is a vast shame that US corporate profit is now apparently dictating statute in Europe to the detriment of the ordinary people of Europe.
Sorry, but no, it isn't. You might think that it should be their right, but nowhere is this spelled out as a fundamental human right and there are plenty of people who think otherwise.
That isn't at all what copyright is like. You don't own the song; you own the copyright on it, meaning that the government agrees to stop people from producing their own copies of the song without your permission. And when copyright expires, you aren't forced to give up your song — you can still have it to enjoy for as long as you like, but you aren't allowed to stop other people from making others like it anymore.
Copyright is protection from competition. If copyright on companies existed, there would only be one bakery in the world because whoever first made a bakery would own the copyright on bakery companies. This is obviously absurd when applied to companies, which is why it isn't. At a certain point, though, it also becomes absurd when applied to artistic works, because the whole point of giving this protection to artistic works is to enrich our culture, not shove our culture into IP silos in perpetuity.
Personally, I'd give software the shortest copyright terms, music slightly longer, and literary works slightly longer than that, with no copyright term ever longer than 28 years.
As an aside, increasing lifespans should give us more time to enjoy the world and push it forward. Instead, they're used as a justification to slow the world down with things like longer copyright terms for long-lived authors.
What good does it do a song you wrote in 1960 to be copyrighted in 2060?
Imagine if you were still making money off a program you wrote in 1960. Almost inconceivable in any mass market.
This isn't uncommon even now, actually, but especially with yet-unknown artists publishers will often push pretty hard against it, and usually get what they want. I think removing it as a possibility would be good for artists in most cases.
This has affected me and my business in the past - see http://blog.th.ingsmadeoutofotherthin.gs/eucalyptus-availabl... (halfway down, "A Note on Copyright" has an explanation of this oddity).
Here in Denver (2M population in the larger metro area) there are at least:
- One AM swing/standards station (Benny Goodman etc) playing music from the thirties to the sixties.
- Two FM oldies stations, one of which is also AM, playing music from the fifties to the seventies.
- Two primarily classic rock FM stations and one progressive station that sits partly in their Venn diagram, playing music from the sixties to the eighties.
- A public FM station that plays folk/bluegrass/world, back to the thirties.
That's not to say that the retirement plan is any more solid than an NBA career, but the music itself, if it once had traction, will likely be played for a long time.
Isn't that narrowing down, to a few super-stars who stand the test of time, quite typical? There must be lots of rock musicians from the 1970's who I cannot now remember and will never bother to listen to.
Musicians need to put some of their current income into a pension plan. They cannot expect to get royalties when they are old, whatever the duration of copyright.
For example: where's the big new music scene? It's not because there's no musical avenues left to investigate. It's because our culture is so laden with ideas, we're incapable of propagating new ones into the mainstream. Why not an exploration into pure acoustic tonality, a la Yoshida Brothers? Because our culture is not capable of accepting it. We've become static. Hell, the whole concept of a "hipster" was in thrifting old, expired cultures. The vogue was in retro. Bruce Sterling, eat your heart out.
So, to answer your question: if we don't see any major cultural revolutions? Soon, but genesis will always be around 1900-1960.
If we get cyborgs and AI? Never. It would be like trying to rehash ragtime. Eventually patents will melt away, and reform at the beginning of the new age.
Basically: patents are the cultural realization that old ideas are still valid and commercially viable today. I don't like that, but there it is.
I think people would not even know how to handle it if eg the Beatles recordings would suddenly be free. They would probably still buy CDs in the stores.
The [Copyright Term Extension] Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
I'm not sure that extending copyright from lifetime+50years to lifetime+70years was really aimed at encouraging creators to create more.
Steamboat Willy was released in 1928, so expect the next extension in around ten years time.
There have only been 3 Mickey Mouse cartoons in the last 56 years and the cynic in me suspects that they are only being made to boost their moral justification for continually extending the copyright on the character. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mickey_Mouse_cartoons
Alas, unlike the USA, there is no offical reason why it should be protected.
Many things (telegraph, telephone, Tee Vee, automobiles, Knuth-Morris-Pratt pattern matching) are invented nearly simultaneously by several inventors. If "intellectual property" is property, how can more than 1 person own it?
If you don't account for independent invention, your "respect" is fake, and doesn't take into account the labor of the independent inventor.
It had something to do with the differences between the philosophies of Locke and Hegel, and how the former had more influence over American political philosophy, and the later had more influence over European political philosophy.
Anyway, the net result is that in the US, the philosophical view of IP is tied to the idea that you should own the fruits of your labor, including mental labor. In Europe, the philosophical view is that the works of an author are an extension of the author's personality, and so you should have rights over them for the same reason you have rights over your mind.
This is why European copyright law has much stronger recognition for so called "moral" rights than does the US, such as rights of attribution, rights of artists to prevent defacements of their works, and so on.
Of course, I don't feel terribly much sympathy for them - they've all lived lives of privilege that I will probably never know, and I don't see why they should be able to continue making even more money from something they did half a century ago.
I wouldn't mind so much, except that in the music world, the idea of a derived work has received such a broad definition by the legal system. I mean, I don't think it unreasonable that the Beatles should continue to receive money for copies of their performance of Hey Jude, but why can't another artist do a cover without having to pay them, 50 years down the track? IP was supposed to aid creative expression, not stifle it!
This extension only applies to their recordings (as performers). The songwriting copyright is already set at 70 years, so nothing is changing there.
(It'd be interesting there if the extension were not to 70 years, but to 170 years; much of the music industry's jazz catalogue would retroactively be plagiarism, because it frequently quotes from out of copyright jazz standards, and even older folk songs.)
All art is derivative, originality is a myth.
The only pillaging here is being done by politicians and lobbyists who are preventing new developments from being adapted and evolved. The creative contribution of Hendrix's recording of "All Along the Watchtower" is something many of us appreciate, but we've also seen glimpses into what sort of creations can be made with it (e.g., Battlestar Galactica's adaptation at the end of Season 3) and we're now being denied that by decisions like these.
The problem is that the music industry is too engrossed with its 'potential profits' that it can't find any 'actual profits'. They'll sell the licence to a 10 second segment of a song for a million dollars, which no one will buy and the record will get more obscure and less in demand just because the licencee could make huge money and their work is integral on that licence.
This could be resolved simply by saying the licence fee is $1 per unit sold per year. A song that sells a million copies in its first year maybe should have a licence fee of a million dollars for valid reasons. A 40 year old recording that shipped 10 units last month, definitely isn't worth a million, and $120 in a licence fee is probably the most money the artist or studio has seen from it in a long time.
I'm sorry, but the abolition of slavery took a civil war to resolve and it didn't have nearly as much money entangled in it as the copyright industry does. So unless The Pirate Bay launches an army, I don't think copyright is going anywhere. It would be more commendable to actually get the clauses exploited by corporations for (and sometimes against) their own gain fixed.
Time limited copyright (say 10 years) almost certainly is beneficial, perpetual copyright is harmful both culturally and in the long run economically.
Perpetual copyright on copyrights as they are today would cause a great amount of work to be lost due to the owners greed and stupidity.
As per my suggestion on licencing a work could become free-use much sooner than the copyright period expires. Anything with no units shipped would mean its a free license.
As I've said elsewhere, and originally, I'm in favour of 20 years and extensions for derivative works, and perhaps then only on the right to produce derivatives and on no other rights like reproduction.
Copyright should be granted for free for a short amount of time.
Once that is up, the copyright holder should have the option of extending the copyright. They should be made to pay for this right, since the extension of the copyright only really benefits them.
This would allow copyright holders to keep a hold of stuff that is obviously profitable, at the same time the vast majority of stuff would enter the public domain.
i.e. Some legislators write a law, then pass it to a panel of judges, the judges attach a note indicating what they determined the purpose of the law was, and then the law went on for a vote. The opinion wouldn't have any legal effect, but it might provide for a bit more honesty.