20-Year Copyright Extensions Coming To Europe 268
unlametheweak points out a story at Ars Technica which begins:
"After a UK government-led commission said that the current 50-year term for musical copyrights was fine, and the government last year publicly agreed that there was no need to extend the term, culture minister Andy Burnham yesterday made the logical follow-up announcement that yes, the government would now push for a 20-year extension on copyright. Turns out, it's the moral thing to do. Actually, by framing the issue as a 'moral case,' Burnham gets to sidestep the entire issue of logic. Critics have already begun to charge that he is ignoring actual evidence and the well-regarded conclusions of the Gowers Report (PDF), not to mention previous government policy. But when the issue becomes a moral one and the livelihood of aging performers is at stake, it's suddenly easier to avoid cost/benefit analysis."
How sad (Score:5, Interesting)
How sad. I wonder why I bothered spending the time to put a detailed comment into Gowers, if the government was just going to ignore the outcome anyway (and having agreed with it at that!). This is hardly the way to encourage the people to contribute to their "democracy".
Melancholy Elephants (Score:5, Interesting)
What is happening with the world? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is happening with the world? Seriously..?
It seems the politicians are just having a nervous BREAKDOWN all over the place. If it's not about increasing surveillance, it's fighting terrorism, increasing copyright timespan and frankly, just about anything that's NOT BENEFICIAL OF CITIZENS AT ALL.
I'm so tired of all this. I was seriously thinking of giving up the fighting but instead I joined the Pirate Party (Sweden). They push their core ideas such as integrity, freedom of expression and freedom to fileshare copyrighted works (that one I don't care that much about).
I absolutely have lost interest of the politics concerning e.g. healthcare, economics, welfare, defense, infrastructure and what have you. I'm 100% focused on the integrity issues - because, if we have no private life, what the fuck do we have exactly?
Each and every one party in Sweden is pushing their agenda on the surveillance except for the Pirate Party which is non-negotiably against. Parties traditionally very concerned with integrity issues have been completely HIJACKED and are now pro-surveillance. Just the past year Sweden is about to:
1) Let the state wiretap the entire country (with un-supportable claims that this will only be done to connections crossing the border)
2) Give copyright-holders the privilege to ask an ISP for the identity behind an IP-address (what the FUCK? Swedish RIIA)
3) Implement the EU directive to store traffic data (SMS, MMS, E-mail, web, telephone, cellphone) at the very least 6 months. By the way, this includes position data - now everyone carrying a cellphone can be tracked (at least 6 months back - do you remember where you were 6 months back??). Brilliant! Swedish politicians wants to go further than this and require 1-2 years of storage.
I've had it. The politicians are so fucking ignorant that I just want to vomit. This state is in a state of hijack and it's fucking time to revolt. The Pirate Party is gaining voters.
Earlier today I sent an e-mail to the Swedish Security Police (something akin of an investigative police concering itself with e.g. terrorism) asking its head judicial if they have completely lost their mind. Haven't received an answer yet.
This whole surveillance thing makes me queasy. I cannot for the life of me begin to understand the politicians reasoning for fucking up this (past) democracy like this. :-((
Unfortunately, the other guys are just as bad (Score:5, Interesting)
The Conservatives recently reiterated their commitment to a similar policy, unfortunately, so we're basically screwed.
For the record, if you look at the submissions to the Gowers Review by members of the public (of which there were many, which are available on-line from the government's Gowers Review web site) you find that despite the huge scope of the review, many of the replies concentrated on this issue, sometimes only this issue — and I didn't see a single one in favour of copyright term extension.
Problem Solved (Score:3, Interesting)
Outright theft (Score:4, Interesting)
Advantages of doing it: Distribution companies that own old stuff get more money. Disadvantages of doing it: People that created and sold stuff get ripped off. (I.E. You were a young musician that sold rights to a piece to a company for 50 years. You now have to pay that company to perform it. You were looking forward to the time when you could legally perform it again without paying someone else but now are SCREWED.)
Fine by me (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's all about ensuring aging performers (who can no longer physically perform) continue to make money, that's fine.
Just set a required minimum royalty rate of 50% on all copyrighted works more than 50 years old.
That shouldn't be a problem, right? I mean, this is being done for the performers, isn't it?
Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (Score:3, Interesting)
When copyrights become an issue according to the European Court of Human Rights (or similar authorities), like they did for the UK DNA database [slashdot.org], then you can claim it's a "moral case."
FYI: From the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, [unhchr.ch] Article 15, Number 1: "The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone... To benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author."
There is a lot of debate over the meaning of Article 15, but many pro-IP people take it to mean that copyrights are a human right.
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
Because God knows both Cliff and Paul could do with all the income they can get in their autumn years.
Paul McCartney is worth $1.5 billion. I don't think he'd be hurting one bit if he never released another Christmas album -- ever.
Re:Problem Solved (Score:3, Interesting)
Its about neither performers nor consumers.
Its about protecting the profitability of the companies that have enough money to send lobbyists and make bribes.
The base-energy state of democracy is always having to vote for the lesser of two evils. The energy itself is the population, who has grown to be fat and lazy. As long as the governments of the world ease these changes into place one step at a time, most people won't even notice. If most people don't notice, they won't take action.
I have no solution to this problem.
Re:Melancholy Elephants (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html [spiderrobinson.com]
The writing style sucketh mightily, but the idea behind it is gold. Extending copyright to certain expressions for too long is just plain stupid. Every artist is influenced by what has gone before. "If I can see further than most, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" applies to art, music, and literature, not just to science.
Time we acknowledge that with a reduction, to 20 years, of copyright. Imagine how much poorer we'd all be, how many fewer new devices we'd have, if patents were valid for 95 years? Copyright should be no different.
Re:What is happening with the world? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's quite simple really. During the Cold War, the communism was perceived as a real alternative to western capitalist societies (although it never was a real alternative). So the politicians were more careful to the needs of people.
With the fall of Iron Curtain, this alternative doesn't exist anymore. So they are trying to get more power, because they don't feel so restrained as before.
1960s rock? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the next decade, a number of extremely profitable back catalogues of 1960s UK music groups would be going out of copyright without an extension: at least the early works of the Beatles, Cliff Richard, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, The Kinks, The Who, etc.
This is about =performance= copyrights (Score:4, Interesting)
Conventional copyrights for printed works (c)... expire according to a "death plus" rule. In the UK, they used to expire at "death plus fifty years", and were then extended to "death plus seventy years" to harmonise with the US and with some other parts of the EU. For those cases, "twenty-year extensions" came to Europe a while back.
Online sources tend to give the impression that musical scores and songwriting are included in the "literary" rule, and I don't have any reason to believe that that's wrong. Anyhows I haven't seen anyone in the UK complaining about songwriting copyright terms.
What HAS been discussed in the UK for the last few years, amidst talk of things being unfair, is the separate recording copyrights issue (p) ...
Unlike conventional copyrights, recording copyrights in the UK are (AFIK) currently set to a simple fifty years from the date of the recording.
This means that if you were a recording artist in the 1960's, and you didn't write your own songs, or if you were a member of a band, and your name wasn't listed as a songwriter on the tracks you played on, then your payments for those tracks being played or sold are about to stop dead.
So David Bowie's going to be fine, and the members of the the Kinks, the Who, the Rolling Stones etc who have songwriting credits are going to be fine. All the songs stay in copyright.
But the other band members who didn't get their names listed as co-writers are going to find their performance payments stopping. The people who're most pissed off are likely to be the band members who contributed a significant part of classic tracks - a key guitar solo or bassline intro, f'rinstance - but were never listed as songwriters. Up until now, they've been getting the performance payments. On expiry, they're no longer going to own the rights to their voices or to their playing on those recordings.
Re:Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Righ (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, it's impossible to reconcile that with freedom of speech (which encompasses the verbatim repetition of others' speech) so perhaps it's not really a human right after all. Certainly it's no natural right, like free speech is. And it's a negative right (i.e. copyrights aren't a right to do anything -- that's free speech -- but instead is a right to prohibit other people from doing things), which makes it even more dubious to claim it's a human right.
Frankly, while I have no problem with the idea of copyright as a utilitarian system meant to benefit the public, or with copyright systems that actually accomplish that, the notion that it's a human right is obvious bullshit.
Re:What is happening with the world? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Rip off (Score:2, Interesting)
If you think that that's a wonderful deal, then you're quite free to quit your job and try getting a loan to set up your own software company, or a chain of shops, or some other similar high-risk enterprise.
Sure, and equally, if they think that the current copyright terms are such a bad deal, then they are free to get a job instead.
The problem is that they make the choice to do this, but then years later whine about it, and demand the system to be retroactively changed. Which is no better than someone choosing to be employed, and then 50 years later whining that he should get more money.
The "employer" who will do that is you.
Right, and copyright extensions mean that the employer will unfairly get control over material that someone else wrote for longer. Does the employee retroactively get a pay increase? Of course not.
Re:How sad (Score:3, Interesting)
stop the right-wing scaremongering
A) Is this the same prime minister who made it illegal to not carry an ID?
B) This is left wing scare mongering.
Copyright extention is theft (Score:5, Interesting)
When you buy a car and don't have all the money at once, you get a loan and you pay it off in small amounts at regularly scheduled intervals. WHEN you buy the car, the number of intervals and the amount of money that you are spending for the car is fixed. You and the seller agree on a price. That price is the number of car payments that you are going to make. When you have finished making all those payments, you own the car.
If, right before your last scheduled payment, the seller says that you must now make ANOTHER 20 or 30 payments in order to own the car, then he is stealing your money by breaking the legal sales contract. Which said X number of payments for ownership of the car.
Copyright works the same way. The owner of the copyright gets fixed payments for a fixed number of years for allowing the 'property' to be used. After that period of time, the 'property' passes into the public domain, where no one has to pay the copyright owner for using the 'property'.
By changing the number of years that an item is in copyright, the lawmakers are breaking a legal contract between the public and the copyright owner. They are stealing money from the public and giving it to the (what is supposed to be the former) copyright owner. They are stealing the public domain.
This often happens after the copyright owners give money to the people who are changing the law. They are bribing the lawmakers to get the lawmakers to give public resources (the intellectual property public domain) to them. They, the copyright owners who bribe and the lawmakers who take these bribes, should both be sent to prison.