EU Proposes Retroactive Copyright Extension 514
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has unveiled a plan to retroactively extend musical copyrights by 45 years, which would make EU musical copyrights last 95 years total. Why? They're worried that musicians won't continue to collect royalties when they retire and this will give them an additional 45 years during which they won't have to produce any new music. Perhaps the only good point is that the retroactive extensions won't take effect for any works which aren't marketed in the first year after the extension. Additionally, while there are many non-musical retirees wishing they could get paid for 95 years after they finish working, McCreevy has not announced any new plans to help them."
Re:The summary overlooked the other reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:5, Interesting)
Add to that the fact that most new artists lose all there copyrights to the labels by contract and you'll find the only ones not getting screwed by the extension is the labels. Infact for the most part many artists will lose more money since the labels "own" most of their songs they will have to pay royalties to the labels every time the perform them!!!
What's different from physical property though? (Score:4, Interesting)
In other news, people whose great great grandfathers fenced off land and invested in *property* retain the ownership to it still, despite having died many years ago.
Nobody shows any sign of caring that they can inherit property which they contributed *nothing* towards, and have full expectation of leaving that same property to their children.
yet if that property is intellectual rather than physical, there is huge outcry.
Why the double standard?
because a big chunk of many populations expect to benefit from inheriting daddy's house, whereas the people who benefit from IP are a smaller number, and thus easily attacked.
All earnings from old IP are taxed. All earnings from property are taxed. What is the difference here?
Who really gets paid? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a novel idea: abolish copyright. [abolishcopyright.com]. We should act now before this gets even more dumb.
This is all about Ireland (Score:3, Interesting)
The upshot is that shills like McCreevy are trying to keep the artists on board by proposing that they get something which no other professional gets, (if 95 years copyright for a writer, why not 95 years for a patent?) hoping that Ireland will benefit in some way from tax collection. Apple is also strongly represented In Ireland and can presumably afford lobbyists.
The economic downturn and the gradual ending of EU structural funding (supposedly for building railways and roads but actually diverted to building country houses for the rich Irish) is putting a strain on the Irish economy. They need the money
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:5, Interesting)
but without copyright, the creative commons and GPL wouldn't work, these things rely on copyright law.
personally, have no problem with an automatic 14 year copyright term being applied to any creative endeavor, hell, maybe even throw in a one-time-only 14 year extension for a fee. but after that, everything should enter public domain.
I can't be the 1st person to think of this system...
The Plan! (Score:3, Interesting)
2/ Alter the words.
3/ Copyright it and give no credit to the original author.
4/ Charge huge royalty payments for casual use or even small portions.
5/ The estate collects the money for the next 95 years! Happy Birthday To You (c)
Some will argue that it is the "American Way" to do such fencing off of various praries and certainly many have become rich by poineering ways to make money out of what was free before. It is really no more the American way than selling wildcat claims with a single seeded gold nugget for the mark to find or selling the deeds to public bridges. It is disturbing that this behaviour is getting exported to Europe.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What happens when its the Penguins turn? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The summary overlooked the other reason (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Retirement (Score:1, Interesting)
Which raises the interesting question: shouldn't all work be "intellectual property?" Shouldn't we get royalties forever for all the work we do?
Re:The Plan! (Score:5, Interesting)
Just an addendum: You can use the music to "Happy Birthday" - that is a folk tune, and anonymous' copyrights have expired. (Just be sure to credit the music under the name of that forgotten folk tune.)
All that it copyrighted are the words. All 5 of them:
"Happy birthday to you... dear _________"
How ingenious.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:4, Interesting)
Please explain how "discovering" certain numbers / symbols work well in certain situations is any different to "discovering" certain notes / words work well in certain situations, to the extent that the "artist" is entitled to free-load for the rest of their lives, while the mathematician is not.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:1, Interesting)
Wow does anyone actually know about the subject or do they think studio muscians are out to screw them? How many out there hope to retire, raise your hands? Okay Muscians actually do get paid and this isn't about record companies. This is the poor sap playing his ass off. The summory makes a stupid statement about getting royalties 95 years after they stop working. Did they even read their own summory???? It's about extending it 45 years because say you work 60 years, common with musicians, then retire you still get paid for your earlier work. Not everything is about the evil empire of record labels some of it is about working stiffs that barely make a living. For every pop star there's a 1,000 that barely pay rent. Just tour? Say you are 85 and can't stand anymore and arthritus is so bad you can't play? Is the answer welfare so you don't have to pay for music? If you have a right to a retirement then why don't they?
Re:No pensions? (Score:1, Interesting)
A minority of them and their relatives are "special" (AKA: get a fucking job like the rest of us [bbc.co.uk]). I'm speaking as a musician, not one who is particularly fond of Mr McCreevy [digitalmajority.org].
I suspect the council of ministers will try and rush this one through using procedural rules to prevent a parliamentary vote, because there's no way in hell anybody who isn't on the music industry payroll will let this one slide!
Retroactive extension = breaking the deal (Score:5, Interesting)
Now they (the copyright lobby) want to break that deal by lobbying the gov't to retroactively extend the monopoly by Y years. Now tell me again, why should I respect the deal when the other side doesn't?
This is why I voted against the constitution ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... it would give even more power to the European Commission.
They're a bunch of unelected bureaucrats which do not in any way consider the interests of the EU citizens but instead bend over backwards to serve the interests of those corporation which will give them well paid jobs once they've done their time in the European Commission.
(notice how all help-the-industry-f**k-the-consumers proposals of late have come from the commission)
Good thing the Irish brought down the sham attempt at bringing back the EU constitution through the back door that was the Lisbon Treaty.
The funny part is that I'm actual pro-EU and actually feel European. The concept is good, it's just that some EU institutions are degraded and corrupt and need to be eliminated or thoroughly remade.
We need elected legislators instead of these puppets.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:4, Interesting)
But also Mathematics gets designed by mathematicians to "somehow work". And it takes some time until the "works somehow" settles down to a nice, elegant theorem or a small lemma you teach your students.
Look at the different attempts to pinpoint the continuity of the Real Numbers (Dirichlet, Bolzano-Weierstrass, Cauchy...). All those approaches were not discovered, but obviously created to generalize the idea, that infinite fractures are Real Numbers. The discovery lies in the fact that all three approaches are equivalent.
Similarly you could look at the approaches to define computability. How many different definitions for computability are there? 10? 30? But nevertheless all are equivalent and boil down to the same set of functions. Each of them is a creation, and the discovery is just the fact that the newly created version of computability is equivalent to the already known ones.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:5, Interesting)
The only reason I can't use your car or house when you aren't using it is because of artificial laws saying I can't and granting you protection from such actions - whats the difference? I deprive you of something?
Yes, that's the difference. A pretty important one.
Why is that important?
Because if you take my car, I won't be able to use it. I will have been harmed by your actions. Harming people is bad.
On the other hand, if you copy my song/program/movie, I won't have been harmed: I'll still have everything I had before you made that copy. (I might wish you had given me some money for it, but that money was never mine anyway, no matter how hard I was wishing. I might be sad about that, but I won't have suffered any actual loss.)
Surely sharing is a good thing?
Sharing is usually a good thing, but not when someone is harmed in the process. Surely you already knew that?
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well music really is maths then isnt it.
If you add up all the number of timings and all of the different notes... There are only so many different chorus's and melodies that you can come up with. Sure its probably more than the possible number of chess games but hell, you can't copyright an opener in chess now can you? or can you?
Sorry Kasperov, you cant move there, that's the Coke(tm) opener and you haven't paid appropriate royalties. Nope not their either. That's Pepsi's(tm).
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:1, Interesting)
I cannot concur.
Although it is understandable why this "fundamental truths about the universe" is an argument against monopolizing great scientific works by their authors, that reason may apply to natural sciences in general, but not necessarily to mathematics, at least not in all cases.
Mathematics is an open field of intellectual work and it is not WHOLE about universe. It can be and often is, completely creative, all made up in mindspace ... only with logic consistence, just like great works of art. All of natural and even social sciences are covered by some parts of mathematics, but there is huge, even prevailing area of mathematics that are not serving any particular science at all, research that is driven only by curiosity, challenge, lust for beauty and structure. Some of them may eventually meet their physical counterparts in the future but it is in no way guaranteed.
Besides, even if mathematicians DID uncovering fundamental truths about the universe, many artistic and philosophic people are very serious about their claim of artists uncovering fundamental artistic and spiritual truths about universe, to our minds as needed and useful as logical facts.
Don't get me wrong, I belong to "contra copyright" camp, but if artists deserve copyrights, mathematicians deserve them just as much.
"stealing" music (Score:4, Interesting)
The big music companies are always complaining about "stealing" music.
The purpose of copyright was to give a limited monopoly to the creator for a certain time, after which the work was to become public domain.
So by paying the politicians to extend copyright lengths over and over, aren't they using the legal system to steal the public domain music from us?
...not so fast! (Score:2, Interesting)
He said he just looks at a stone... it's all there, already. He then just has to figure out the superfluous parts of the stone and merely remove them
While this is more of a "funny" thing to state, there's some truth to it, and even some depth beyond the fact that sculpture is basically... well... *removing* material.
It's about where creativity comes from: nobody just pops out of his own mom and exclamantes "Hey! I just got an idea! Guess I'm 'creative', heh...". All 'creativity' has a complete range of 'inspirations' lyning at its base and therefore by definition predating it. And 'inspiration' comes, by definition, from outside of the artist's head -- be it from another artits's head, from nature, from society, from somebody's oppinition to another artis's work...
So, in the end, the very act of being 'creative' is already a testimony of having used somebody or something else's work prior to or while creating your own -- be it to a more or less extensive ammount. It's already a proof for the artist infriging somebody else's copyright, to some extent! Now, isn't disallowing everybody any other further use of one's work very
Re:This is why I voted against the constitution .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. The Lisbon treaty was also a legalese mess, so I didn't want it for that reason either. When some politicians speak of the "irish slap in the face" and somehow challenging the will of the people and make Ireland vote again or some such shit, my blood boils.
First of all, not only Ireland rejects the treaty, there are a lot of other countries undecided yet and only the irish people were asked in a referendum, the rest of the countries pushed it through only the respective national parliaments. This was after the previous treaty that was officially labelled the EU constitution was rejected by some countries holding a public referendum before.
So it's not just Ireland, but these idiots somehow feel like pretending only Ireland is the problem and the rest of the 27 countries are all for the new constitution. Bollocks. They even think that the will of the irish people can be ignored if the politicians don't like the outcome, by this standard the will of the people can be ignored in the other countries as well, so they should be made to vote again aswell.
It's not just the commission though, that's making these stupid statements, but elected statesmen aswell. These people should be ashamed of themselves for putting together such a shoddy constitution and instead they try to bully around the few countries that have had the sense to say no. To hell with this.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:4, Interesting)
But their artists! we must protect them! and coddle them!
and pet their long fur and tell them of greener pastures where all the other artists get to romp and play...
Yup. The entire world has gone nuts. I was expecting europe to have some sanity, as some of you are living in houses that were standing when most musicians made their money by playing in the streets, or by selling their copyright to some rich nutjob that collects sonnets.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:2, Interesting)
Take a history course, man. There is much more than just histories, and much writing was done in the Empire. Martial, writer of great epigrams, was active until the Emperor Domitian. Petronius, author of the novel Satyricon, had a place in the court of Nero. Juvenal and Persius, satirists, lived under the emperors. Ovid, who certainly ranks up there in world poetry, wrote under Augustus. Then there's masters of expository verse and rethoric like Boethius (who they're supposedly making a film of), Tertullian, Quintillian, and many, many others
And I don't know where you get the impression that slavery came in with the Empire. Slavery was part of Roman society from the very beginning. One of the earliest Latin texts, the Senatusconsultum de bacchanalibus, contains laws constraining slave's religious devotions. Cato, that old epitome of traditional Roman Republican values, decades much space in his writings to keeping slaves in line.
I've taken several history courses, man.
I know the names you mentioned and some others. But when you consider that the Roman Empire ruled most of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for several hundred years, a shelf's worth of books is not impressive as their total literary output. The UK probably produces that in a few minutes. That's an unfair comparison perhaps but I suspect that democratic Athens was much more productive, despite being centuries earlier. Technologically there seemed to be more or less total stagnation too. Almost everything around at the end of the empire was already invented when Augustus became the first Emperor. In fact most of it was invented by the Athenians.
And never did I state that slavery was not present in the Republic. But it is true that armies of slaves working large estates became much more common in the Empire. It's hardly controversial (unless you're a Roman Plutocrat posting through a timewarp) to suggest that a transition to this sort of economy - a tiny number of plutocrats, little or no middle class and a vast number of slaves would cause a drop in the number of books written and the number of machines invented.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:3, Interesting)
I found this snipet at the very end interesting,
... the proposal will allow works to enter the public domain if neither a record label nor a performer "shows any interest in marketing the sound recording" in the first year after the extension passes (assuming that it does).
which leads me to wonder how "interest" would be shown, would a publisher be required to keep a work in print and distribution to maintain copyright protection? If that's the case then shouldn't it apply to all works at all times, or is that where the EU is heading? Maybe they are just pimping for some sort of ongoing registration maintenance fees.
Copyright is not a right, it's a carrot on a stick (Score:4, Interesting)
From a fair use essay I wrote:
Society benefits the most when something that is created is in the public domain, meaning that nobody holds a copyright. Society, as a whole, owns the work. Shakespeare's plays, most of the writings of Mark Twain, and music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach are in the public domain. Everyone is free to create alternate versions, perform them, or even make a movie with them without getting permission or paying royalties.
However, society also recognizes that people might not have any reason to write books, make movies, or sing songs if everyone else can immediately copy their work. Copyright is a carrot offered by society to help promote the creation of new works. When you get down to it, society is saying, "We understand that there must be some reason for you to create. If you create something, then cannot benefit from it, you will not have a reason to create more works. So, to encourage you, here is a limited period of protection so that you might benefit."
Emphasis on the limited.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:3, Interesting)
Please notice that technological production, to happen, must first become a goal; that it can only become a goal when it's though feasible; and that it can be only thought as feasible when you believe that the natural world can be mathematically rationalized. This last assumption took complete form only with Galileo and Descartes. Thus, although what you say as far as arts go might be valid, you applying it to technology isn't.
Without the precedent set forth by Kepler (who inaugurated the whole thing of trying different mathematical models until one "fits" the data), with Galileo generalizing it to all physical phenomena, with Descartes transposing this generalization into what's nowadays known as "the scientific method", and with Newton afterwards perfecting it by removing Descartes approach of overexplaining things not entirely known so that they fitted the model no matter what (gravity didn't fit Descartes' mechanical model, no matter how hard Newton tried, so he gave up saying something in the line of "Look, I don't know 'how' attraction between distant bodies happens, but it happens, and it happens according this formula. If you want to hypothesize what the ultimate causes are, be my guest. I don't care anymore."), there would be no pursuit of technological progress at all.
That this sequence of intellectual developments happened was hardly more than a very nice historical accident, and it could very well never had happened. Were this the case, and we would be probably no better technologically than the 15th century was. It never happening in all other cultures, ancient and recent alike, is what caused Europe to go a different way.
Re:Well, that's a point of view (Score:3, Interesting)
No, "the parent post" is presenting the facts about Ireland.
It is clear that Ireland will not benefit in any way from a 95 year copyright extension on music rights - in fact less so as there is no revenue to be gained from artists who pay 0% tax.
I'm sure - like a lot of people on /., myself included - you dislike McCreevy for his stance on Software Patents. But to say that he is a shill for Ireland based on one case is stretching it. I will not disagree that the Microsoft investment was influenced by his support for Software Patents, but McCreevy holds those views anyway when Irish interest are not served, as we can see clearly from TFA.
Ireland scores very well on international (non-)corruption tables.
BTW Ireland is not necessarily full of selfless businessman, the individuals in question were living in Manchester at the time.
Re:Who really gets paid? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, the Chinese and Koreans invented their own versions of the printing press long before Gutenberg. And they still don't give a rat's ass about copyright laws. Europeans invented copyright laws, not mass book copying.