Given how quickly music becomes "old" I don't understand why copyright needs to chain up music any longer than two decades (I'm being kinda generous, some songs are old after a few months / one to five years). I hate the state of copyrighted works. Movies can stay copyrighted for a good 40 to 50 years, anything else is crazy. Books maybe 50 years too, but again, it's just crazy and clear that the extended years of copyright only benefit record labels and other publishing corporations, and not truly the artists / authors who get decent money, but it's mostly chump change.
Ten years of free protection, then costing $10 × 1.5 ⁿ ⁻ ¹ for each subsequent year. Year 10 costs $0, year 20 about $380, year 30 about $22,000, year 40 about $1,300,000, year 50 almost $75,000,000—and few fifty-year-old things will be worth $75,000,000 per year and growing to retain copyright to.
Since we're talking music, I'd probably want a hybrid. This for passive protection, but say auto-extension free of charge if the creator still trades on it. So Aerosmith who continues to do performances of their work would be able to say they're actively protecting it (and when that stops, the clock starts against the previously described mechanism) whereas Led Zeppelin, or whoever owns the rights to their works, would be in this already and paying to retain protections (if they so choose).
Hey, this could even be a method of artists reacquiring rights to their works from labels: if an artist performs songs from their works 20 years ago and the label isn't interested in paying for this protection scheme, it can revert back to the artist until they decide to stop actively protecting the work. It gets dicey with two parties having rights to it, but structurally it would probably be akin to how if you pay tax on a dollar and give me the remainder, I should then still pay taxes on what I received from you, regardless of the fact you had paid taxes on it already.
Nah, keep it simple. The twentieth year is only up to $380, which is still chicken feed. Don’t add unnecessary complexity: make it simple enough that any layman can understand it completely.
I don’t think Disney would keep their rodent. Calculate the sum, and by about eighty years, $10 × 1.5 ⁶⁹ is some $14 trillion, so they’d have handily paid off the US national debt by then. Another fifteen years, to get back to the beginning of the sordid affair, would be mildly ruinous.
I don't think that it makes sense to allow people to monopolize content indefinitely, nor do I think that it is appropriate to charge individuals for a copyright. The accounting involved in this scheme is also not going to make anyone happy; a flat n-year copyright term is much easier than an algorithm.
Because without Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (granting many extra years of copyright), Mickey Mouse would be public domain. Simple as that - the agenda is obvious. Expect similar "extension" push as 2024 approaches.
Nope. Mickey Mouse is not subject to copyright. As a character, he's subject to trademark, which allows him to remain under Disney's control for as long as they continue to protect the trademark.
What would go into the public domain is Steamboat Willie, the original Mickey Mouse short.
> As above: expect another attempt to push the copyright protection further, shortly.
No, it really does appear that this time they've given up. There are articles that have written about this - If Disney were preparing for a big push, we'd have started to see it by now already.
You are indeed correct - and the copyright extension affected more than Steamboat Willie; going into the full scope would mean to venture into TL;DR territory.
> Given how quickly music becomes "old" I don't understand why copyright needs to chain up music any longer than two decades
You say that but the Beatles, Elvis, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson are all artists that had their heyday 30-60 years ago and are still the top selling artists. A lot of them are dead now because of varying reasons, but some are still alive and kicking and giving new performances of their 40 year old music.
Are you going to tell them they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they had one of their most successful releases?
> Are you going to tell them they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they had one of their most successful releases?
Are you claiming they wouldn't have made the music otherwise? It's hard to imagine such megastars deciding that the marginal effort of another hit album just wasn't worth making unless they could collect hypothetical revenue for more than 2 decades.
Copyright law is to incentivize creating these works so that more stuff can get into the public domain. We've shot well past that point with excessive durations, and the public domain is suffering.
Copyright law is to incentivize creating these works so that more stuff can get into the public domain.
You've drank too much kool-aid. Copyright law is to incentivize investments in creative works, not the creation itself. Most people that profit off of creative works have not created anything of value themselves.
According to US legal theory, the point of incentivizing investments is to increase how much money can be made by the creator, incentivizing creation.
To quote the Constitution, the purpose of copyright is "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." ie To increase how much creation there is.
It doesn’t matter if they created the work 20 years ago or not, it’s theirs. Can people go into your house 20 years after you build it and just say it’s their because they like the way it looks? Intellectual property is still property.
Intellectual property is not property in that way because you are not deprived of it when it is shared.
If you charged people $5 for a lifetime pass to hang out in
and inspect your house, should they not be able to try to build their own version of your house 20 years later?
When you enter something into the culture, part of it leaves your control, and thats a good thing.
Many people would argue that information shouldn't be classified as property. Maybe it shouldn't be completely free to reproduce and share, but thinking of it as property has obvious negative effects.
Do you propose IP be treated similarly to real property? Maybe require a permit from the government before one writes a book or song to ensure that work will be in the public interest?
> Are you going to tell them they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they had one of their most successful releases?
I work in software, as I assume many of us do. I don't assume an inherent right to gain perpetual income from my work. The vast majority of all employment operates this way.
I'm not sure how that reality doesn't undermine the idea that there exists some inherent right to prevent other people from, say, singing a song they heard (by getting a local authority to recognize you as the author of that song, and then stop others from singing that song and making money from their performances, by putting them in jail or fining them if they do, for example).
It's important to make a clear distinction between the kind of "right" copyright represents and, for example, the right to free expression.
The underpinnings of the rights are different. We assume that everyone legitimately starts off with the right to free expression.
It's not so clear that everyone starts off with some inherent legitimate right to prevent some dude two doors down from re-singing a song you came up with and sung to him.
It seems much more reasonable to view copyright as an artificial right: something we create to promote certain ends. The state is in no way obligated to provide the establishment of copyright (it's not a real "right"), so the justification for its bounds is entirely pragmatic: what benefit it has to society in general.
Copyright isn't here to protect the creator, but the copyrights holder. The great extension of copyright (way beyond the artist life) is there so a few copies holders keep their IPs for a handful of mega-successful acts: Mickey, The Beatles, Elvis,...
Screwing us all because they are still able to milk the cow is unfair. Money-making cannot be the only factor taken into account. Public domain is something we, as a society, deserve.
If anything I'm more for stripping record labels of their copyright, an artist can keep their copyright till they die for all I care. Their families shouldn't depend solely on one artist's income. There's many angles to copyright, it's a complicated subject cause of it, but we need to take away all the noise of it, this legalized censorship against allegedly copyrighted works doesn't actually work is the main issue. Most artists don't even care that their fans download their music until their record labels have them say otherwise. Artists from what I recall make more money selling merchandise and doing concerts...
In fact, that right already exists (in the US), it's Section 203 - artists can terminate their copyright grants after 35 years after the publishing date.
That's quite insightful, now if only after 50 years it would be terminated, regardless of whether the artist is dead or alive. If they want to give them a renewed copyright grant or something that's another story, and it should end the moment the artist dies. Till death do us part indeed.
Copyright treats music, lyrics, and recording as separate entities. The recording of a song is a derivative work of music and lyrics. I'd strongly favor shortening the copyright on audio recordings, while keeping the copyright for music and lyrics strictly with the composer and writer, respectively, for a longer term.
The same could happen for video recordings and their screenplays.
I think maybe the "works for hire" regime needs to be changed such that employees own the copyright to their own contribution to a work, and the employer just gets an automatic perpetual license only to works created while on the job, exclusive only as long as the employee remains employed, and the final aggregated commercial product is a derivative work from many sources. So if you can reassemble the same team of actual humans as the original, you can re-do the work of putting their contributions together, and acquire a new copyright on a new aggregate that could be nearly identical to the older aggregate.
So you only hold a monopoly on a movie as long as the majority of key contributors in that long credits scroll at the end continues to work for you. If you fire too many people after production wraps up, particularly the script writers and scene planners and digital modelers, they could get together, compare notes, and do a shot-for-shot remake at a fraction of the budget, because their part of the work has already been done, and you lost exclusivity when you fired them.
That would surely invoke a new form of Hollywood Accounting, but at least it would encourage creators to create works with some durance in preference to consume-once ephemera. And you wouldn't end up with great artists in poverty even as their works make their current owners heaps of money.
It is still important work to turn an artwork into a viable commercial product, and to assemble and manage teams of artists to great something together greater than what could be produced individually, but that added value should not make the middleman the sole gatekeeper for the source works, forever.
> Artists from what I recall make more money selling merchandise and doing concerts
True, because every ass and his dog pirates music, thus the income from selling music is severely diminished. The amount of time it takes to produce/compose/record etc. music is not exactly trivial, and if you have to tour constantly in order to be able to pay the bills, then finding time and energy to create some new music to perform whilst on tour becomes quite problematic. Your "most artists don't care" statement is a crock of shit! Perhaps large established artists may not care so much, but if you're talking about "most artists" then they do care that income from their craft is being denied to them.
Can you provide some proof that "pirating" (I hate that word) had severely diminished sold copies? And I don't mean all those "studies" based on the false premise that downloaded records are lost sales.
Other commenters have mentioned about how pirating can increase exposure and in fact increase sales - Breaking Bad (which isn't music) is one big name example of this happening.
In any case, "album sales" is a very one dimensional view of the world. Even if fans were to pirate music, there is no way to pirate live performances - and exposure is one such way to boost sales of live performances so lost sales in albums is a very narrow slice of the entire ecosystem.
No I cannot, but conversely can you prove that is has not?
All I can proffer is anecdote that as bandwidth and the ubiquity of Internet increased over the years, the sales of music via the label I'm involved with diminished. All the while our artists and the label itself became more and more popular, so it seems entirely counter inuitive that sales should have been dropping.
I don't buy music from labels or online shops. I go to either an artists website or somewhere the artists will directly get the money from it or i'll buy albums from shows. I've probably paid for more music in the last few years than I did most of the time as a teenager. I feel a lot better giving my money to people who are more directly involved in creating the music than large companies that produce albums for them. Hell i've even bought some new recently produced vinyl albums in the last couple years. When I was young I refused to use places like hmv so all I did was either pirate or buy music from shows. Now i've replaced pirating with buying music online.
The thing is there's just so much music now. The artists you represent may be more popular but there's so much more competition for people's money. There's music i've bough I enjoy from artists whose shows i'll probably never get to see. I spend a lot of time listening to concerts and such these artists freely post online, i'm enjoying their music, legally, but I haven't paid for it.
There are a lot of things contributing.to lower album sales. Piracy, while i'm sure contributes doesn't seem to be the biggest problem. Plus i've been hearing this since I was a kid and cassette tapes were being blamed for killing the music industry because people could just record anything they want off the radio or a friend's cassette so album sales were dropping.
It is now, but the drop in record sales started before Spotify — it started with Napster and similar services. Spotify grew from a market reaction to those sales lost due to theft.
You say that like no-one would show up to a Paul McCartney concert if Beatles songs were public domain.
In actuality, the examples you listed are especially painful because we could be enjoying incredible derivative works based on their music, if not for the stupid way copyright works.
Music is a bad example since the rights system around making covers is incredibly generous compared to other mediums. The fact that just about every Beatles song has a cover in just about every style bears witness to that.
The mashup "genre" currently is full of amateurs, because copyright law won't allow you to make money off it. Sampling is used to great effect by hip hop artists, but only in very limited ways because they have to negotiate expensive licenses each time. If not for copyright, we'd see amazing innovations.
To get an idea what would be possible, listen to the Beastie Boys album "Paul's Boutique", which has been called "The Sgt. Pepper of Hip Hop". It liberally samples all kinds of sources (including Beatles), and the results are amazing, even with that limited 1989 technology. Unfortunately, shortly after that album was released, legal precedents around music copyright doomed any similar works until copyright law changes.
"Are you going to tell them they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they had one of their most successful releases?"
In a word, yes. The entire purpose of copyright is to enrich the commons by granting a limited term monopoly. Without that purpose in mind, copyright loses legitimacy.
It's a government granted right, and, in the US, there is specific authorization in the constitution to make such a grant. The term could be set to any term, and there would be no underlying constitutional of inherent human rights case against such a change. Unlike actual rights, copyright is whatever governments say it is.
All rights, human rights included, are just some arbitrary rules some part of humans have decided to follow.
These laws could also set the counter for let's say 5 years after the death of all of the original authors or something like that. There is no reason for these rights to transfer indefinitely.
In many constitutional systems, rights are assumed to exist, and rights are protected by wording that prohibit the government from infringing them.
That's not how patents and copyright work. These are government granted monopolies. The wording goes the other way around: The government is authorized to grant these monopolies. That's very unlike rights to life, property, etc. Patents and copyright don't come from the same tradition as proper human rights. They're different, and there is no human rights argument against limiting them sharply, at least not in the US constitution.
You need to read the US Declaration of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The signers knew what they were doing was against the Kings laws - but they said, for the first time, there are higher laws that everyone is entitled to. Copyright and patents, while maybe good law, are not among these.
For me the important thing is that _they said_ that there are higher laws. Don't take me wrong, I do like the human rights and all. But they are just a man made construct, there is no higher power bestowing any of them upon us–it is up to humanity to ensure that we keep them.
A lot of those people laying bricks are still around. Are you going to tell me they have no right to their own work anymore 20 years after they laid those bricks?
After all they are still alive and kicking and people are still walking on those streets many years later.
We 'knowledge workers' have it pretty easy compared to the people doing physical work. 30 years should be plenty for all media.
Different situation. Brick layers are getting their full salary when they work. Content creators don't have a salary, but a recurring revenue from sales.
I, for one, would say they should have no right to it.
Hell, everyone you mentioned became a millionaire during their career. If all of them stopped receiving royalties for any of their releases after one measly year, they'd have made more money than I'm ever likely to make. Superstars have most to lose in absolute terms if copyright got nerfed, but in relative terms they'd still do fine. Many of the most successful performers of the last century became multimillionaires before they even turned 20.
Monetary value and cultural value shouldn't be conflated. Folk music and Shakespeare plays are very popular and highly regarded despite being public domain. Not to mention that people actually make money with them.
Pink Floyd would make a mint by touring even if all their albums were in PD. You can start a Floyd cover band all you like but for some reason most fans would still prefer to see the genuine article.
Anyone can legally perform any piece of music because copyright law contains a provision called a "compulsory license." This is how an artist can "cover" someone else's song. Congress deemed music too important to allow the author to lock it up for years. An author automatically grants a license to anyone who wants to perform a piece at a rate per second per person fixed annually.
One thing I find bewildering is how the ownership of a song is far longer than the ownership of a recording.
I remember reading about (very liberal) Randy Bachmann supporting a very conservative copyright plan, and being confused... but it was explained that his earlier recordings were going to be public domain while he still lived. That was his worry - that he would cease to own his first albums. Not the songs, which are covered constantly, but the actual albums.
To me, it's exactly backwards that recordings have a short shelf-life (X0 years), while writings compositions have a long one (X0 years after death of author). It seems far more important to me to allow new artists to iterate on old art, than it does to set the actual original recorded performance of that art free.
