Dead Musicians Signing Media Rights Petitions

epeus writes "Following from the Gowers coverage and the Musicians' ad in the FT, Larry Lessig admits he was wrong about term extension: 'If you read the list, you'll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead (e.g. Lonnie Donegan, died 4th November 2002; Freddie Garrity, died 20th May 2006). I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues to inspire. I'm not yet sure how. But I guess I should be a good sport about it, and just confess I was wrong. For if artists can sign petitions after they've died, then why can't they produce new recordings fifty year ago?'"

they should have a whip round

[Anonymous Coward]

i wonder what the net worth of these 4500 "artists" are ?

then compare it with the net worth of 4500 Wallmart shop employees or 4500 Ford car plant workers who wont be getting paid either for work they did 50 years ago

perhaps the music industry needs a close audit to see where those 4500 poor, poor starving musicians are going wrong
if you have nothing to hide as they say...

Remember, this is not just about the Royalties...

[russ1337]

They're using every means possible to ensure their copyright gets extended. If copyright is not extended it will have a huge negative effect on the record companies / British Phonographic Industry (BPI), RIAA groups and content distributors, beyond that of royalties paid.

Content in the public domain waters down the argument for requiring ALL content to be 'protected'. If half of the worlds music was public domain, lobbyists would have a hard time persuading lawmakers to put restrictions on ALL devices. This has been evident with the RIAA continuously argue why DRM is required for ALL music to prevent copyright infringement. These arguments usually fail to recognize the existence of non-copyrighted music (Creative Commons, Public Domain etc), and certainly make no provision for it in their argument or 'industry drafted bills' (e.g DMCA). This results in systems like the Zune wi-fi sharing system which applies DRM when transferring songs, whether the media requires protection or not, and with total disregard for other licences such as 'copyleft' which may expressly forbid it.

We've seen from the Napster and Gokster cases in the 'war on file sharing' argued that "file sharing is always infringement of somebody's copyright", and fails to recognize the legal uses of file sharing systems. Again, if half of the worlds music was public domain, the argument agaisnt services like Bit-torrent is significantly watered down. Services like Youtube and Google Video have already been targeted, and we've seen media companies desire to shutdown the service altogether. Although Youtube and Google video are exceptional in that they've been careful to prevent copyright infringement from the start, and the result has been for the media companies attempts to re-define infringement. (i.e teenagers lip-sinking etc). Again their aim is to prove the majority of content that is free is infringing copyright and the services providing it should be shut-down.

We are seeing the music industry / BPI "pulling out all the stops" to prevent an extension of copyright. They're using artists that have done very very well out of record company who may 'win the hearts and minds of the people' (Cliff Richard), and now their padding their 'stats' with dead people. It is certain they are lobbying politicians as fast as they can.

The BPI (and RIAA) have responsibilities "in the collection, administration and distribution of music licenses and royalties" which relies on a vast library of content being under their control. Music that is currently in their control placed in the public domain erodes their breadth of responsibility and will ultimately affect their cut of the royalties.

This argument is not about the artists getting more money, it is about the BPI and RIAA retaining their value and ability to "fight the crime of music theft".

They cannot fight the "crime" if half the time it is perfectly legal to copy and share.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this is a polemic to show why the view is wrong and I'm just missing it...

Things should pass into the public domain. Everything should which is not based on tangable property. Tangable property should be taxed on death (possibly up to 100%).
If you think about how the world would look if we all had eternal rights to our property there would be about 100 people who would own everything and the rest of humanity would die, although a revolution would probably be inevitable anyway and then maybe some more sensible rules could come in.

It is also not judical theft, it is the state acting in the best interests of the population, in exactly the same way it does with people's other rights from the state of nature. They have a legitimate right to do this.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[idlake]

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.

You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them, you can tell your kids about them.

You want something completely different: you want the power of the state to create a market place for you where there ordinarily wouldn't be one. There is nothing "ethical" about that; it's an artificial construct and a compromise between the rights of the people (which copyright infringes on) and the desire to encourage creation of new, useful content.

The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented, you wouldn't be able to create anything at all since inventors of basic ideas and creators of basic content are using license enforcement to restrict others from building new stuff. Expiration of copyright is fundamentally necessary for intellectual property to work--if stuff didn't fall into the public domain, others couldn't derive benefits from ideas that build on the old ideas.

Or, to put it bluntly: your ethics are screwed up, and so are your economics.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Tom]

You confuse copyright with ownership. Not a surprise that muddling these terms is exactly what the "intellectual property" mafia has been doing for yours.

The painting is yours as property and will belong to you forever, your heirs will inherit it, etc.

The copyright enters the public domain, i.e. after n years someone else can take a photo of your painting and publish it in a book without paying you for doing so. Someone else can sing your song without paying you for it.

The ethical rule fails here because copyright is not a limit on what people can do with your property, but what they can make with their own hands and work.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Znork]

"if you make something, it belongs to you"

Copyright, however, isnt about the possession of the object, it's the right to prevent anyone else from possessing a copy of that object.

If you're a carpenter and make a great chair it doesnt pass into the public domain, but you cannot prevent your neighbour from making a chair just like it, nor do you have the right to prevent anyone who purchases the chair to pay another carpenter to copy it.

"It's basically judicial theft."

Except it's the other way around. Preventing the neighbour or customer from making a chair just like the original means you're depriving them of the right to do what they wish with their property.

The value of copyright does not come out of nowhere; it derives its value by depriving others of value and rights. From an ethical point of view it's just the same as other taxation methods; you're depriving one group of people to give to another. Wether that's good or bad is arguable, and mostly a question of public utility.

Whenever you hear "corporation" or "association"

[The Master Control P]

Remember that corporations meet almost every criteria for being psychopaths [wikipedia.org] that doesn't involve age or sexuality (Jokes about getting raped at the pump notwithstanding).

Pathological lying, conning/manipulative, shameless, parasitic lifestyle, irresponsibility? I consider it extremely unlikely that they wouldn't know that a member was dead (seeing as he wouldn't be showing up for recording and all), and even then, so what? If the signatures were genuine, no dead person's name could possibly be on the list. Yet another in the media industry's endless stream of manipulative lies. Naturally, when called out, they will shamelessly deny any previous knowledge. Parasitic lifestyle? We hear every day how the Internet makes the recording industry obsolete. Irresponsible? Like forging dead people's signatures?

Corporations are psychopaths. But they aren't psychopathic because they enjoy being evil - If they don't act like this, the shareholders can sue (If you don't [obviously wrong action], it's bad for profit = lawsuit). If this nonsense is to stop while it's still possible to get corporations back under control, the law needs to change. Seeing as it's 4am, I leave it to the rest of you to propose the changes.

Re:Remember, this is not just about the Royalties.

[grahammm]

The material does not even have to be in the public domain for it to "water down" the argument for all content to be protected. Works released under licences such as Creative Commons, which allow (sometimes with restrictions) copying and sharing while still retaining copyright, also water down the argument. In fact they add something new to 'pot'. If DRM is mandated (such that players will only play DRM protected content) then the DRM 'system' will have to handle the situation where the rights owner does allow copying, sampling etc. This would, of course, include putting no restrictions on content which is in the public domain either because the copyright has expired or it has been deliberately placed in the public domain.

Advertising Standard Authority

[MythMoth]

If this is an Advert in the UK Edition of the FT, then the appropriate action to take would be to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority. ASA rulings are usually considered newsworthy in a minor way, and would raise awareness of the issue.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's basically judicial theft.

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives."

Uh, no. If you make something, it belongs to you, yes, and you can do what you want with it. But if you make a car, and it belongs to you, obviously if someone steals it you don't have it anymore, and you can't use it or pass it on to your kids. If, however, you write a poem, novel, or a piece of sheet music, you can still hang on to it forever, and it is still yours, and you can pass it on to your children, but once you make zillions of copies and sell them (i.e. publish it), what then? What's to prevent someone from copying it themselves? In the absence of copyright law, nothing. You can appeal to people's sense of ethics, but history shows that often doesn't work, and there is a grey line regarding what constitutes copying a work versus merely being inspired by it. Anyway, people haven't stolen your copy from you if they make their own copy, either from the paper expression of it or by listening to you reciting the material or playing it, and writing down their own copy from what they heard. They are NOT stealing from you, they are duplicating what you made. It would be like seeing your car, and then manufacturing their own, identical version. They have not stolen your car.

Now, you can call it "judicial theft" that under copyright law your work will eventually pass into the public domain, but in actuality it is a simple bargain. A contract of a sort. You'd like legal protection against people attempting to make copies of your work? That's fine. In the interests of encouraging you to publish your work, you can get a period where you, exclusively, can make and optionally sell copies of your work. The public (via law) is giving you that right and will enforce its protection using the judiciary and police. In exchange, after a reasonable period of time (to be defined), the same law says that you must turn the work over to the public domain -- i.e. the exclusive period has limited duration. Copyright is not "judicial theft", it is this bargain. You get something (exclusive copy rights), the public gets something (the eventual end of those rights).

Don't like it? It's simple. Keep the work to yourself (i.e. don't publish it), and it will forever remain under your complete control. Put your original in the attic, and your kids can keep it and admire it forever.

To put it simply: if you don't like the ethics of copyright law, then don't enter into the bargain by publishing your work.

And if you want to enter into the world where, due to application of strict ethics, people can't use any of each other's good ideas to develop their own, because it's "wrong", well, that would be a pretty stifling environment in which to try to operate.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Anonymous Coward]

So-- you're up for paying royalties for the use of Aristotle's works? Or Shakespeare's plays? Should we be paying to take photos of the Sistine Chapel? How about churches coughing up for the use of the King James bible? Maybe we should go back and find all of Edgar Allen Poe's relatives, start paying them royalties to offset the effects of "judicial theft" over the years (especially those football-playing bastards in Baltimore!).

We may not be able to track down the heirs of Aristotle, but what about Mark Twain? How about Thomas Jefferson?

The idea of perpetual copyright seems wonderfully logical when you apply the (incredibly recent and very inappropriate) label of "intellectual property" to them. But when you start looking at older works, particularly those of nearly immeasurable cultural value, it becomes apparent that, at some point in time, copyright protection is neither reasonable nor appropriate.

Copyrights should not be permanently transferrable

[PyrotekNX]

One of the biggest problems with the recording industry is that the artists sign over their copyright holdings permanently instead of leasing them. Right now the transfer of copyright is complete and permanent.

The lease should end when the contract does. The artist or artists would then have the option to renew their contract and lease, sign a new contract / release indie, or release it into the public domain.

With a lease, you can be assured that there isn't an abuse of the power that record labels have now. A simple law could make these current types of contracts obsolete and illegal. Artists should also be able to reference this law and get their copyrights returned to the rightful owner.

This kind of thing is being done with the LOTR Trilogy and The Hobbit. The movie rights were leased to Miramax for a short period. If they do not finish the movies within that timeframe, they cannot release them.

Lets face it, record labels themselves are an obsolete business model. There are many ways to do self promotion now and you don't need to include a 3rd party publisher. A simple website, some iTunes tracks and a live tour are you really need to promote yourself. All labels really do is publish little plastic discs. They don't need exclusive rights to your material to do that.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[ZachPruckowski]

Except this is 50 years ex post facto. If anyone can copy your table after 50, would that make you go back and uncreate it? I mean, after 50 years, if you haven't turned a profit on your first table, either by selling it or appreciating its exclusivity, you're not going to. I think we can count on two hands the number of songs that are still making money after 50 years. And most of the people who made them are dead. So the question isn't "Do I have enough incentive to create this table?" because removing copyright extension takes no rights from you, it just doesn't give you extra rights. So the argument here is that artists will arise from the dead, build a time machine, and then go back and stop themselves from entering the recording business, because their kids and grandkids are only making thousands instead of tens of thousands.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[TrekkieGod]

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.

If you make something physical, that object belongs to you. You paid for the materials, you did the work. If you show it to someone, and they like it, they might decide to build one themselves. The one they build does not belong to you, it belongs to them.

Intellectual property is very different from real property. Here's another example:

Let's say you tell someone that you have this ESP-like feeling that the numbers 17 35 8 7 22 and 19 are going to be this week's lotto numbers. You go ahead and play those numbers, and guess what...the person you told them to figures they might play them as well. You both win. Now the jackpot is divided between the two of you. Do you think you should have the right to sue them because it was your idea to play those numbers? If you didn't want them to play those numbers, why did you tell it to them?

Music is pretty much the same way. If you don't want to share it with the world at large, you can write it and keep it a secret. Record it, play it to yourself when no one else is at home. No one is going to "steal it" from you. However, you want other people to listen don't you? You want to make money off of it? Well, once they listen, it becomes part of their culture. They might get it stuck in their heads. They might be whistling it while they work. They might like to sing along with it when they hear it on the radio. They'll reference the lyrics when they think they would bring something to the conversation. The music is now theirs. It's part of them. By letting them hear it, you gave it to them.

Any rights you have to prevent them from singing it in public (like Happy Birthday in restaurants), or to otherwise copy it, is purely artificial. Nothing is being taken from you. You still have the guitar you used to compose the music (unless you sold it), you still have the original recordings (unless you threw them away), you can still play them yourself. The only reason people can copy your song is because you let them have it in the first place. So choose. Keep your song secret and profit from it, or give it to the community.

You want both? Well, if you're a good musician, society wants to encourage you to write more songs. So we'll give you the artificial right to control what is now our song for a set number of years. They should be small enough that you can't really live off of that one song for the rest of your life. After all, that defeats the purpose of encouraging you to write more songs, doesn't it?

Do you want to profit from the song after the copyright has expired? Feel free. Society has this strange "celebrity complex." If you perform the song in public, the people who like the song will pay to be near you, to see you there, next to them, singing it live. Society has taken nothing from you. You definitely gave something to society. Stop trying to steal it back from us, while at the same time keeping our money.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[ZachPruckowski]

We're not talking about stealing the table. We're talking about copying the table. There's a large difference. If someone copies the table, all you lose is the uniqueness of your table. You still have your table.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[zotz]

"This is not true if copyright is taken away. You then cannot make money from your creations, because anyone else can make copies of them for free."

Funny how people in industries who can't get copyrights on their creations still make money.

"In what sense?

It seems to me if I create something, it belongs to *me*."

OK, so it belongs to you, keep it to yourself. Only reveal it to people under contract and with non-disclosure agreements. Keep it as a trade secret. Just don't make it public.

"So it seems to me I'm using the power of the State to prevent theft."

Ah, nope, you want the state to give you a monopoly. I just hope your are not one of those "thieves" who tell other people's jokes around the water cooler. I trust that every joke or story you have ever relayed has been your own creation or that you have tracked down the creator and paid for your use.

The world cannot function as you envision. (I know that if you were to try my suggestion that it would be tough too. That is why short term copyrights may be worth while, but unending copyrights can't work.)

I also find it odd that artists can't live with the same length of protection as inventors. I have never seen a person pushing for unending copyrights try to explain that.

"How can I make songs or films or software, when they cost me time and money, when I cannot recapture those costs?"

Well, some of us have figured out some ways to do so and are working on more besides. If you want to enter into negotiations for a contract under which I will reveal this inside information to you, please contact me with an initial offer.

all the best,

drew

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[XoXus]

You need to sell it, because you spent the last year doing nothing else but make it and now you have to pay your rent and buy food and clothes.

Well then this person is an idiot, isn't he?

I want to sit around in my pajamas all day and make macaroni necklaces; where's my god-given right to get paid for that? Huh? To get paid for something, I have to do something that someone else is willing to give me money for.

Copyright is a state-granted monopoly to encourage the creation of creative works - it's for the public's benefit, not the artist's benefit.

Who benefits?

[mouthbeef]

Do they really want us to believe that today's musicians will record more music if they get 95 years of copyright? Is there a musician (who doesn't write his own songs -- compositions get life ) for whom the deciding factor on recording a song is the infinitesimal chance that her song will be commercially viable after 50 years?

The risk that a musician is so dispirited by only getting 50 years of copyright on the recordings of her work is wholly theoretical. No one can point to such a musician. That musician, btw, isn't tomorrow's artist -- it's all recording artists since the term of phonogram monopoly was set at 50 years. Every song recorded for for the 20th century was produced with that incentive (or less).

However, there are two very real, non-theoretical groups of musicians for whom the existing term of 50 years is too long:

* Samplers and remixers. This is a non-theoretical, concrete and visible group of working musicians. They are unable to incorporate other works from culture into theirs without paying -- and not just paying, either. It's nearly impossible for an artist outside of the label system to clear samples from the labels' catalogues. That's because the labels give preferential treatement to one another in a mutually assured destruction dynamic (if EMI doesn't license its samples to Sony, then Sony can refuse to license to EMI). The effect of this for samplers and remixers in the UK is that they have to either:

1. Be criminals

2. Not make art

3. Sign up for the deal the labels offer, assign copyright in their works to the labels, and take the crummy "recoup"-based payment scheme the labels offer.

Talk about creating a buyer's market for what musicians have to sell!

* The other group of musicians harmed by the overlong term is those whose work is forgotten -- orphaned by society. In these cases, either the label still holds the copyright but won't reissue the musician's work (Universal's Decca warehouse in London holds the entire, unreleased catalogue of roots music, back to steel cylinders, and Universal hasn't even catalogued that collection, let alone made plans to re-release it); or no one knows who hold the copyright, because the deal was done so long ago.

At a recent Future of Music conference, Alanis Morrisette's attorney said that in his research, over 80% of all music recorded is not in the stream of commerce. In Eldred v Ashcroft, the US Supreme Court fount that *ninety eight percent* of all copyrighted works are "orphans".

For these musicians, alive or dead, there is a fate worse than penury: obscurity. Their works -- the art they cherished and midwifed -- have been eliminated from the historical record. We have piled their recordings up in a huge bonfire and burned them in slow motion.

Finally, there's another non-hypothetical, real, visible group of artists for whom term extension is directly harmful: composers.

People who write songs get a much longer term of copyright than those who perform them. When Elvis goes into the public domain and his records are re-issued, the black songwriters whose work he performed *still* get paid by the reissuers. Right now, these composers are hostage to Elvis's label: if they don't re-release, the composers don't get a cheque. But the elimination of the majors from the equation makes it possible for a much more diverse population of entrepreneurs to arrange for such a re-release.

It's pure sophistry to wring your hands about some theoretical economic situation that will arise for musicians in 2056 when their present-day copyrights expire; that would be fine if there weren't great groups of concrete, present-day musicians crying out to have this happen.

The holders of today's 50 year copyrights fall into three groups:

* Holders of commercially non-viable copyrights (almost all of them fall into this category) -- this group receives direct harm from term extension

* Giant corporations that non-negotiably forced their artists to assign all copyright t

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Dun Malg]

How do I recapture the time and money I spent making the table if other people make copies for free?

I cannot.

And since I cannot, I can't make the table in the first place, because I need to make money so I can feed myself and rent my flat and buy clothes.

That, sir, is neither my nor society at large's fucking problem. How do you get paid for something that seems inherently unprofitable? Well, either you find a way to make money off it, or you do something lese for money. The world does not automatically owe you something just because you worked hard at some arbitrary task.

Now, as it happens, we as a society decided a long time ago that all this writing, music, and such are a great boon for the cultural commons. In order to encourage the expansion of our common culture, we decided to add a little incentive to the process. We decided to allow the creator, for a limited time, to abridge the rights of others to freely share via copying the work, thereby giving him the means to make a little cash off the monopoly. This scheme has been twisted by publishers over the years via legislation and prpaganda into a de jure "ownership" of the work, and fools like you have bought into it, actually believing that artifacts of our common culture (music, literature, etc) can somehow belong to anyone.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Dun Malg]

It is wrong to say the holder "would not otherwise have" this right. Ethically, it belongs to him - he invested the time and money to make it; it is *his property*.

Cripes, you really are a moron, aren't you. You keep repeating the same falsehood as if by being more emphatic it will make you less wrong.

It isn't fucking property in the first place, and "ethics" have nothing to do with that. You cannot own an idea, a song, or a story. You can own the copyright on a song, but a copyright is simply a legal fiction. The song itself is a cultural artifact that belongs to everyone.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[msparshatt]

It's my assertion that it would be very hard to come up with a work which is 100% original and that if you did produce such a work it wouldn't be very popular due to it being so different to everything else.

Most innovation is incremental. It comes about by refining and improving earlier innovations.

Many of Shakespeare's [wikipedia.org] plays were based on other plays.

Similarly Beethoven [wikipedia.org] based his earlier works on those of Haydn and Mozart.

These are the things which would be lost if it was possible to go back in time and implement the OP's idea of a permanent copyright.

Re:they should have a whip round

[Sponge Bath]

...getting paid for work you did a long time ago.

More precisely, that is collecting on deferred benefits they contracted for in return for their work long ago. It is a straight forward exchange of benefits for work.

In the case of extending copyrights, the beneficiaries are trying to get something for nothing.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[vidarh]

However, there are other rights - such a private property - and violation of those rights will, as a consequence, make it impossible to be successful in certain types of business.

And the rights granted under copyright law are not "property". Without the time limited monopoly granted by copyright law as a limitation of free speech you wouldn't have any property-like rights to prevent copying at all.

It is wrong to say the holder "would not otherwise have" this right.

Ethically, it belongs to him - he invested the time and money to make it; it is *his property*.

Ethics is entirely subjective. Using it as an argument as to what belongs to whom only works when you talk to someone who agrees with you about what is ethical or not.

Legally on the other hand, it clearly is NOT property. Historically as well, it has never been considered property by society at large. On the contrary, the history of copyright shows very clearly that it has been assumed by most people that there was no natural property right to prevent copying, and that there were no ethical issues with doing so.

Indeed, patents arose from the same idea - that there is no inherent right to prevent copies, even of a physical object - so in addition to copyright, government also granted a temporary monopoly to give an economic incentive to publicize the internals of machines that would otherwise be hard to copy, so that once the monopoly expired, it would be easier to copy. Hence we have patents.

A similar protection was granted for trademarks. That is perhaps the one case where an ethical consideration comes in. Trademarks have two justifications: 1) That it would be unfair for someone to take advantage of the work someone else has put in to make a brand well known, 2) That it would cause consumer confusion, possibly leading consumers to pick inferior products if people could use others trademarks at will. Even in this case, property rights were only part of the consideration, and the original ethical aspects relates as much to the consumer protection issue as to protecting the trademark holder.

Further, your argument that something is ethically the creator's property just because "he invested the time and money to make it" is quite obviously flawed. No right arises just because one has spent time and money on something: If I spend time and money to make public land look prettier, the land doesn't suddenly become mine, and I get no other special rights to it. In fact, if I spend time and money to do just about anything, it only gives me ownership within the confines of a very restricted set of circumstances:

• If I create something out of material I own, on my own time I own it, and this is recognized by most people both as a natural right, and by most countries as a legal right
• If I create something out of material someone else owns, or on time when I'm paid to be employed by someone else, it doesn't matter if I spent time and (my own) money creating it, the object will in most cases belong to the owner of the material I used or my employer.
• If I create a new form of device or an idea expressable as a device, I may apply for a patent as a temporary monopoly. I don't own the idea, but temporary rights to exploit the idea economically, and property rights to whatever physical devices I create according to the idea.
• If I create a copyrightable work, I don't own the expression of the work, but a set of temporary rights to control the economic exploitation of that work by limiting access to copying it and any physical expressions of the work I create myself

The idea that using your time and money to create something somehow automatically makes it yours certainly has no basis in the legal or ethical frameworks most of us live under and by. It might do in your ethical framework, but don't expect the rest of the world to care.

If anything, contrary to your view, the ethics of restrict

Re:they should have a whip round

[DDLKermit007]

What we have here is more likening to the dipshit offspring of that Ford employee demanding that they get the same compensation for their parents work. These people are more detestable than the lawyers that represent them.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[StringBlade]

The crux of this problem is that you're treating ideas and creativity as property -- intangible ethereal things as tangible physical things. Please try to ignore the fact that lawyers and the media are hung up on this terminology of "intellectual property". No one owns an idea - it's not possible, just as owning a thought isn't possible and I'll prove it to you:

I just had a thought about pink elephants dancing in a tutu. Whatever you do, if forbid you to think about pink elephants dancing in a tutu. It's my thought, my idea - you're not allowed to have it! But I'll bet the first image that popped into your head was of a pink elephant in a tutu. There's nothing I can do to keep you from thinking (short of killing you) and it would be impractical to try and do so. Such are ideas and creativity.

Getting back to the table, here we have a person who's spent a lot of time and energy in the process of transforming his/her idea of a grand table into something tangible - a real table. This person has put this effort into the table for primarily one of two reasons: 1. He/she hoped to sell it and make a profit on it, or 2. He/she did it for the sheer enjoyment of expression and is not expecting recompense for the effort. Your argument hinges on #1, so we'll stick with that.

There is nothing in law that says you have a right to make a profit in a business venture. If that were the case, then we'd never see an out of business sign. If I come along and see the table for sale and think it's an absolutely gorgeous table, but the creator is asking an outrageous price (in my opinion) for it, I can go home and make my own version of the table for the cost of materials and effort. If I have a photographic memory and am equally as skilled as the original artist, then I could reproduce exactly the same table. At this point, I've effectively copied his/her table. If I then try to sell my table, I could be getting into legal troubles assuming his/her table is copyrighted and someone actually notices both.

But the GP's point was that if I waited 50 years before I built my copy of the table and the original table creator hadn't sold his/hers yet, they're not going to - at least not at that price, but certainly it doesn't seem likely. Add to that the fact that they're probably not likely to sell it for enough money to cover the last 50 years of living expenses, and you've got yourself a failed business venture. Certainly after 50 years, my duplicate table would not be considered infringing by any rational person (the original artisan excepted).

Copyright is a limited grant by the government to a monopoly on your creative expression, not on the idea the spawned it. Copyright concerns itself with implementation of an idea, not the idea itself. Patents on the other hand used to be the same, but have since run amok and act like they cover broad ideas and generalities now, particularly in software and processes. However, patents cost a substantial amount of money to apply for and (though unlikely) have the potential of being turned down. Copyright is free, automatic, and getting to be perpetual (I think they still can run out, but I'm not sure after how long).

This is why your argument fails, and why copying is not stealing. Stealing implies the denial of something rightfully yours. Copying does not deny you anything you had a right to in the first place. You didn't have an exclusive right to the idea. You also didn't have a right to profit in your business venture. The only limited right you are granted under copyright is to prevent another from benefiting economically from your work without your permission. A copy for non-commercial personal use (especially if I performed extensive effort to duplicate your work without direct access to the original) is so gray in terms of the fair use clause that you'd probably never make it out of court with a smile on your face.

So for the benefit of society, please stop spreading the RIAA (and others')

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Belial6]

I think they should just charge "Property Tax" on "Intellectual Property". Then when you do your taxes, you have a choice as to how much you are going to value your "Property" at. If you value it at $100, then when you sue someone, you can only sue for $100 in damages. If you value it at $300,000,000, then you have to pay taxes on $300,000,000. Of course at any time you should be able to abdicate rights to the "Property", and then you would no longer have to pay taxes on it.

Re:they should have a whip round

[miskatonic alumnus]

One would hope that the record companies and "musicians" favor extending copyright because their recordings are still selling and making money

If they want to make more money, they can get their asses back into the recording studio. That's what copyright is for.

Re:they should have a whip round

[MrLint]

Well this is a quite interesting point. However 2 things, the car makers signed a contract. They had plenty of lawyers to look it over to tell them if it was a good idea or not. If they think they got bad advice .. sue the lawyers! (ha ha)

Also there is the reason as to why these people haven't worked for them in decades. As we know in the past (and present) there was an artificial retirement age which often was note tied to the ability to work. Also there were numerous employee buyouts in order to reduce workforce to 'save money', which were also contractual.

On a final note, how much would you like to bet that copyright extensions BS would vanish if the copyright reverted to the author after its initial run instead of the RIAA?

Re:they should have a whip round

[Sponge Bath]

...extending copyright because their recordings are still selling and making money

These entities are free to sell and make money from these recordings in perpetuity without copyright extensions. They just won't be able to demand as much after the government enforced monopoly expires.

Re:What about the songwriters' children?

[sh4na]

I'm not a musician. I expect to provide to my loved ones while I'm alive, and when I die, I expect that what I leave behind will be enough for them to provide for themselves. I don't expect them to live off what I did. Why should children of musicians be any different? If a musician dies, is everyone that he/she provides supposed to continue to live off of them for years? What's so fucking special about being a musician that makes their children unable to provide for themselves so bad that they have to live off of the musician's rights?

This is simply the most ridiculous argument I've ever heard. "Oh gawd, think of the poor children!!" o_0

You're right, but you're missing the point.

[Grendel Drago]

Yes, you're right, but you're not responding to the point the GP made. If anyone can copy, perform and sell a song that you just wrote, that takes away your incentive to write the song in the first place. The whole point is that copyright provides a limited-term monopoly to prevent against exactly the situation you describe. Note that the GP said that anyone can do what they will with the work "after n years".

Copyright terms of length zero lend themselves to abuses which will disincentivize creative work, and thus impoverish the culture. Copyright terms of length infinity lend themselves to abuses which will lock up creative works forever, and thus impoverish the culture. The point, as it has always been, is balance.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[Sir Homer]

If I purchase a book, the book becomes my property. Yet by law, I am not allowed to make a copy of said book until the copyright expires on it. In fact, copyright restricts private property rights by restricting what you can do with your own property.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[vidarh]

No, because people are not property. Contracts must be voluntary and well-informed. Slavery is not such a contract, since it is not voluntary.

You completely missed the point. Re-read: "By that argument, laws against slavery is "judicial theft" too then, as it prevents me from exploiting my property in ways I can't afford if I have to hire people to do it."

"Property" in that statement refers to "land". The point being exactly that the fact that you have invested time and money in something does not give you any rights to infringe on the rights of others. Thank you for making my argument for me.

So, if I spent ten years making a massive work of art, I pay for my rent, clothes and food during that whole time, it belongs to "the people"?

No. The specific instance of your work of art, be it a physical book, painting or sheet music, belongs to you. However, the moment you choose to share it with anyone in public, whoever you share it with have a right to share it with whomever they please other than as restricted by law. You have no property right to the expression of that work. What you do have, is a time limited monopoly on some forms of expressing that work, to give you a better chance of making some money off it, granted to you by the public as an incentive to put effort into your work. If you don't believe you get sufficient protection from whatever copyright terms are currently allowed for by law in your country, then that is your problem and something you should take into account when you start your work. You have no inherent rights to prevent anyone else from doing things with your work once published beyond those provided by copyright law.

Welcome to reality.

You are actually also only given that right for creative works, which undermine your earlier "money and time" argument even further. In the US a further step in this direction was made when the Supreme court in 1991 overrode what was called the "Sweat and brow" doctrine in Feist v Rural, by finding that mere time and effort was not sufficient to make a compilation of facts copyrightable - there must be a creative element.

The point being, that the court recognizes that the purpose of copyright protection is to promote creativity, not to protect your investment of money and time, and so copyright protection is granted by society only when it does actually coincide with our goals of giving an incentive to create creative works.

Nobody forces you to create. And you don't have any rights to restricts what others will do to their property, even if that means copying what you have done with your property, beyond what society has agreed in the form of laws, and which society can change.

And if I keep it - which is to say, I have permanant copyright - I'm infringing their right to free speech?

You miss the point. If you tell no-one, you legally don't actually have any rights at all. There is no copyright on an unpublished work, so if someone else creates a work that is exactly the same as yours and publishes it, they will have copyright to their work, and you would actually in the future have the burden of proving idependent creation (plagiarism cases often centers on "independent creation").

Assuming you mean that you do publish the work, and got "permanent copyright":

It places restrictions on free speech, how could it not be an infringement? The restrictions on free speech we generally accept fall clearly in two classes: Either they are "action speech", i.e. screaming "fire" in a crowded theatre is an incitement to action, and the limitation is not on the speech itself but on the venue, or they are about restricting speech which is false (i.e. libel and slander), in which case the restriction is post-facto (i.e. it can't be libel or slander until it's published - the crime is the damage to someones reputation, not the speech itself).

Copyright restricts speech purely on commercial ground

Re:they should have a whip round

[honkycat]

Right, but they knew the copyright terms when they chose to do the work, now they're trying to change them after entering into the bargain with society. It's more like a long-retired worker deciding that his pension just isn't enough and trying to rewrite his contract.

The reason it works with copyright is because those who sell the recordings stand to gain an enormous amount while those they're bargaining with (i.e., all the citizens) each loses a comparatively small amount. The net effect is still bad for society overall (imo) but it's harder to get someone excited about defending society as a whole.

Re:What about the songwriters' children?

[chill]

You were using circular logic. Everything you mentioned -- novel, music, software -- revolves around copyright. What happens if you have a job like plumber, carpenter, electrician, mechanic, accountant, doctor, lawyer, nurse, cop, firefighter, etc.?

The problem isn't with you making money on a creation after you stopped, it is sitting on your ass and making money for almost a CENTURY after you stopped. Or making money after you're dead.

Copyright has ONE purpose, 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. If you are dead, you aren't promoting the progress of science or useful arts -- you're dead.

LIMITED time was meant as a prod, meaning that after a SHORT period whatever you created would belong to everyone and you could then create something new. If you live off your past successes for you entire life, you are not promoting the progress of science and useful arts, thus not deserving of a government enforced monopoly.

Don't like it? Create something new.

As far as passing more than liquid cash assets to your kids, that is a great idea. May I suggest real estate, vehicles, stocks, bonds, investments, boats, airplanes and most importantly, a solid work ethic that doesn't involve the idea of living off the imagination of a long dead relative.

You're not a libertarian.

[Grendel Drago]

You're not a libertarian. Your vaunted right to go kick down the door of anyone who used one of your ideas is a state-provided monopoly based on no natural law. Ideas spread like fire; the State puts restrictions on how they do so to extract greater public utility.

A real libertarian view of intellectual property would be that the State has no business telling you what to say or not to say, and if you kick down my door because I'm singing a song you wrote, you're initiating force against me and I'm morally obligated to shoot you in the face.

The State does not merely secure intellectual-property rights; it creates them. If you want the State to guarantee you and your descendants a cushy life forever, say so. But don't pretend you're being some kind of rugged, manly individualist when you do.

Re:they should have a whip round

[mrchaotica]

No, you don't understand. In the case of the factory workers, they deserve their pensions because it was part of the agreed-upon compensation at the time of hire. It's just a matter of enforcing a preexisting agreement.

In contrast, these musicians want to retroactively change the agreement, even though they were aware of the terms and willingly agreed to them (by publishing the music) before.

In other words, the first group wants what is owed to them while the second group wants what is not owed to them. It is entirely a matter of petty greed!

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

[mrchaotica]

LOL (literally)! That's the most incredibly amazing idea on this subject I've ever heard! Either start lobbying about it or email it to the EFF RIGHT NOW!

Re:they should have a whip round

[Pseudonym]

Go back to TFA. 50 years is, surely, more than enough to recoup the costs of the album, and an extra 45 on top of that is necessary.

I'm not saying that artists shouldn't be able to recoup their costs. I'm saying that Cliff Richard and The Shadows have more than recouped theirs from their recordings made in 1958.

IP doesn't exist

[npsimons]

I've seen a lot of comments arguing about "intellectual property" and I just want to straighten something out right now: there is no such thing as "intellectual property". Ideas and property are nothing alike; ideas can be copied infinitely at no cost. Property cannot be copied infinitely at no cost. No one can own an idea.

The state (of the people, by the people and for the people) may temporarily grant someone exclusive _rights_ to the copying or use of an idea, but this is nothing like property rights. Property rights are in place because multiple people can't use a piece of property at the same time. Copyrights (and patents) are in place to encourage the advancement of new and useful ideas and art (go ahead, look it up, it's in the constitution).

Don't believe me? Go ask a lawyer about so-called "intellectual property". The first thing she will do is ask you "are you talking about copyrights, patents or trademarks?". You'll notice that none of those has anything to do with property. Don't use the phrase "intellectual property"; it's deceitful language used by manipulative people to try to get you into the frame of mind of treating ideas as property.

Here's some resources.

[Grendel Drago]

You're seriously asking me what harm an infinite-length copyright term could do? That's a remarkably low bar to set. We'll examine the effects of automatically-renewed copyright terms of long, but not infinite, length here in the United States.

(Bear in mind that to seriously argue for infinite terms, you'd have to show harm to the culture that wouldn't occur if terms were only five hundred years long, for instance. And "it enriches their descendants" doesn't count; we have copyright to promote science and the useful arts. Congress can hand me a stack of Benjies for no particular reason, and that'd be "good" for me, but that doesn't make it good public policy, and it absolutely doesn't promote science and the useful arts.)

If you'd like an example of how current culture always makes use of the past, and how that past has been taken out of the hands of creators, there's an excellent presentation by Lawrence Lessig [randomfoo.net].

If you'd like numbers, see Public Knowledge's statistics [blogspot.com] that of the 3 million registered copyrights from 1923 to 1943, only 2% of them were commercially used in 1998. I think tossing 98% of our culture from that period down the memory hole is a terrible thing to do. (The Lessig presentation has a bit about the role of a noncommercial life for many works--most of the books on Project Gutenberg aren't sold any more, but that doesn't mean they're not useful. Better to have them there than nowhere at all.)

If you'd like anecdotes, you can start with Save The Music [copyright.gov]'s overview, then read anecdotes from researchers who had to change or abandon projects because there was no way to clear rights for orphan works [copyright.gov], archivists and documentarians [copyright.gov] who can't use materials from companies that went out of business many years ago [copyright.gov], or old folks who can't get their wedding photographs repaired if their kid tears them [copyright.gov], or the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America--hardly a bunch of Napster-licking college students--collecting anecdotes where the early pulp heritage of SF can't be reproduced or even preserved because early magazines folded, and no one knows who owns the copyright. [copyright.gov]

An Orphan Works system--or requiring copyright registration again--would address most of these concerns. But ironclad copyright of a century or more, let alone eternal copyright, is destructive madness which serves to enrich a few corporations at the expense of our culture at large, by locking up (until they turn to dust--essentially throwing away) any works which aren't commercially exploited any longer.

So, yeah, there's my evidence; the losses are far from being simply theoretical. Your house analogy is ridiculous for reasons pointed out elsewhere in this thread; no one short of Jack Valenti thinks that intellectual property should be administered the same way as physical property. You can read some of the Founders' thoughts on that. [digital-law-online.info] (As I keep saying, copyright is for the benefit of the culture at large; it rewards creators as an incentive to this end. It is, for this reason, a convenient abstraction, similar to physical property in name only.)

(Also, your distinction between "artistic" and "non-artistic" isn't the right one; you're thinking of creative and non-creative works. See Feist v. Rural [wikipedia.org]; it's not your efforts that are copyrighted, but your creativity, once fixed in a tan