EU votes to extend music copyright to 70 years

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14829373

by sambeau • 15 years ago

131 90 15 years ago

bbc.co.uk

waitwhat4• 15 years ago

How long until patents never expire either?

sudont• 15 years ago

We shouldn't confuse causation with correlation, but the slowing of "big" ideas is roughly correlated with the outer limit of the patent age. 1900 seems archaic, but 1960 still seems relevant (Minus those pesky, non-consumption-friendly social movements). Cars, telecommunications, miniskirts. It's like we're seeing our culture enthrone its mores in the way Americans know best: litigation, and the legal system. Our culture is slowing down in some sense, but in reality it's just becoming "legitimate" and stable.

For example: where's the big new music scene? It's not because there's no musical avenues left to investigate. It's because our culture is so laden with ideas, we're incapable of propagating new ones into the mainstream. Why not an exploration into pure acoustic tonality, a la Yoshida Brothers? Because our culture is not capable of accepting it. We've become static. Hell, the whole concept of a "hipster" was in thrifting old, expired cultures. The vogue was in retro. Bruce Sterling, eat your heart out.

So, to answer your question: if we don't see any major cultural revolutions? Soon, but genesis will always be around 1900-1960.

If we get cyborgs and AI? Never. It would be like trying to rehash ragtime. Eventually patents will melt away, and reform at the beginning of the new age.

Basically: patents are the cultural realization that old ideas are still valid and commercially viable today. I don't like that, but there it is.

NolF• 15 years ago

What you describe is largely a Red and Blue ocean issue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy

iwwr2• 15 years ago

What music from the 1940es is such a great moneymaker today that copyright holders can't bear to lose distribution privileges? Rarely are even 2 year old tunes really big sellers.

revorad• 15 years ago

Don't know about the 40's but I expect the Beatles still sell a lot.

demallien• 15 years ago

From the 40s, I don't know, but that's not really the question. Before this vote, the limit was set at 50 years, which meant that all those bands from the 1960s, who are still making decent money, would start to lose income. Think the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Supremes, Bob Dylan.

Of course, I don't feel terribly much sympathy for them - they've all lived lives of privilege that I will probably never know, and I don't see why they should be able to continue making even more money from something they did half a century ago.

I wouldn't mind so much, except that in the music world, the idea of a derived work has received such a broad definition by the legal system. I mean, I don't think it unreasonable that the Beatles should continue to receive money for copies of their performance of Hey Jude, but why can't another artist do a cover without having to pay them, 50 years down the track? IP was supposed to aid creative expression, not stifle it!

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

I mean, I don't think it unreasonable that the Beatles should continue to receive money for copies of their performance of Hey Jude, but why can't another artist do a cover without having to pay them, 50 years down the track? IP was supposed to aid creative expression, not stifle it!

This extension only applies to their recordings (as performers). The songwriting copyright is already set at 70 years, so nothing is changing there.

epo2• 15 years ago

"IP was supposed to aid creative expression, not stifle it!" IP is supposed to benefit creators not plagiarists. Copying someone elses' work is not creative expression.

estel• 15 years ago

What about Happy Birthday?

bediger2• 15 years ago

Does the legal justification for copyright differ in the EU vs the USA? In the USA, the nominal basis is to give a creator a monopoly over reproduction for a time, to encourage that creator to make more.

waitwhat4• 15 years ago

That might have been true about the USA once upon a time, but ...

The [Copyright Term Extension] Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier.

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

I'm not sure that extending copyright from lifetime+50years to lifetime+70years was really aimed at encouraging creators to create more.

EdiX• 15 years ago

It has also been regularly extended every time Mickey Mouse was about to enter public domain, the realistic expectation is that copyright in the USA will never expire.

nkassis• 15 years ago

What is sad about this is a lot of things that were created in the early 1900s will now be lost forever since copies cannot be made and archiving the works on a different medium would infringe copyright. Trying to get the rights for those things is impossible since the owners are dead. So we are going to loose a lot of early music recordings, film and books from that period.

rmc• 15 years ago

No, the EU just recognised that intellectual property should be respected.

Alas, unlike the USA, there is no offical reason why it should be protected.

bediger2• 15 years ago

How does this "respect" account for independent invention?

Many things (telegraph, telephone, Tee Vee, automobiles, Knuth-Morris-Pratt pattern matching) are invented nearly simultaneously by several inventors. If "intellectual property" is property, how can more than 1 person own it?

If you don't account for independent invention, your "respect" is fake, and doesn't take into account the labor of the independent inventor.

tzs• 15 years ago

I recall some discussion of this in the copyright class I took in law school, and it was pretty interesting--hopefully I'll not misremember too much in what follows.

It had something to do with the differences between the philosophies of Locke and Hegel, and how the former had more influence over American political philosophy, and the later had more influence over European political philosophy.

Anyway, the net result is that in the US, the philosophical view of IP is tied to the idea that you should own the fruits of your labor, including mental labor. In Europe, the philosophical view is that the works of an author are an extension of the author's personality, and so you should have rights over them for the same reason you have rights over your mind.

This is why European copyright law has much stronger recognition for so called "moral" rights than does the US, such as rights of attribution, rights of artists to prevent defacements of their works, and so on.

mhansen• 15 years ago

Why? To better incentivize people to make music in the 1940s and 50s?

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

It also means You can trust your music will be your own, for most of your life.

watchandwait• 15 years ago

"Your music" is just a remix of sounds and words from earlier artists. Extending copyright like this stifles innovation and future creativity.

Peaker• 15 years ago

There's no need for retro-activity here. It necessarily does not give any incentive for the works for which it applies, while still costing society the same high price.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

You think people who start their own rock band do it for the pension benefits? Also do you really think this is about a handful of rock groups that would benefit from this? It's all about the labels, period. They stand to gain a lot more from this than a bunch of 70 year old artists, who by the way, are still gaining from their more "recent" 50 year old music.

jemfinch3• 15 years ago

When copyright periods are described, they describe the amount of time after the author's death that the work remains copyrighted. Your music is your own while you live with no limitations; this is about your estate and your inheritors deriving profit from your work, not about you.

lobo_tuerto• 15 years ago

It also means _you_ can trust your music rights will be your music label's own, for most of your life.

ArcticCelt• 15 years ago

In that case force labels to revert 100% of the rights back to the original creators after 25 years. We will see how much those so called "artist rights lobbyist" work for that one.

A1kmm• 15 years ago

If you write music, it will always be your music, even after the copyright has expired.

Copyright is about the government stopping other people from using a work without permission of the copyright holder, not about identifying whose work something is.

eftpotrm• 15 years ago

If I wrote a book in 1961 (hypothetically, that would have been precocious even for my parents), it would be in copyright for 75 years after my death.

If I recorded a song in 1961, that recording would go out of copyright this year under the previous regime.

The rights and wrongs of lengthy copyright protection are a separate issue, but the differential treatment of different artistic forms is something I feel should be addressed. This is a step towards equalisation (not full equalisation but a lot less controversial and so easier to enact), and for that I'm thankful.

jellicle• 15 years ago

Oddly enough, I've never yet seen anyone making the "harmonization" argument argue that the lengthier term should be reduced, rather than arguing that the shorter term should be lengthened. Why is that?

Nor is it clear that different countries and different media should have the same rules in the first place.

code_duck• 15 years ago

Sounds good... the copyright on books should be reduced to that of recordings, I agree. Oh wait, they did they opposite? Why that I wonder?

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

I strongly disagree that copyright terms for different categories of works should be equal, whether out of a sense of "fairness" or for any other reason. The copyright term should be just long enough to encourage production, yet short enough to match the pace of change in the relevant industry.

Personally, I'd give software the shortest copyright terms, music slightly longer, and literary works slightly longer than that, with no copyright term ever longer than 28 years.

As an aside, increasing lifespans should give us more time to enjoy the world and push it forward. Instead, they're used as a justification to slow the world down with things like longer copyright terms for long-lived authors.

serge2k• 15 years ago

A step towards sanity would be to bring other forms of copyright more in line with the 50 years for music.

What good does it do a song you wrote in 1960 to be copyrighted in 2060?

benjoffe• 15 years ago

What would happen to music that is currently say 60 years old? That would have been copyright-free for 10 years and all of a sudden it is under copyright again?

electromagnetic11• 15 years ago

Once the copyright has lapsed, it has lapsed. Unless they did something special beyond simply extending the period then there's no way to renew the copyright.

jrmg• 15 years ago

I'm not sure about this case, but that's not always been true everywhere, historically. In the UK, at least, when books were extended to life + 70 that was retroactive for books originally published there. It was not retroactive in the USA, however (and more sensibly, I would say - whatever your views on term extension).

This has affected me and my business in the past - see http://blog.th.ingsmadeoutofotherthin.gs/eucalyptus-availabl... (halfway down, "A Note on Copyright" has an explanation of this oddity).

acg• 15 years ago

An illustration of why some of the software industry wants to be more like the music industry and why the music industry doesn't want to be like the software industry.

Imagine if you were still making money off a program you wrote in 1960. Almost inconceivable in any mass market.

buster2• 15 years ago

Let alone that most people that made popular music 50 years ago are dead nowadays. It's not the original artist who gets the money but some persons that didn't even work for it!!

lhnz• 15 years ago

They bought the license. Are business deals not work? Do you need proximity to the creation to profit from it?

e_proxus• 15 years ago

Just think about all the now 50-year old music that would become parts of mash-ups and remixes everywhere, creating a lot of new cool music. Now this just won't happen. :-(

markkat• 15 years ago

It would be interesting if for new laws, there were some sort of judicial opinion that could state to their best of their ability what the purpose of the law was.

i.e. Some legislators write a law, then pass it to a panel of judges, the judges attach a note indicating what they determined the purpose of the law was, and then the law went on for a vote. The opinion wouldn't have any legal effect, but it might provide for a bit more honesty.

sylvinus• 15 years ago

I can't stop being amazed at how powerful those lobbies are.

aw3c22• 15 years ago

The idea of free music is non-existent in the minds of most people. Pretty much all our musical "culture history" is those who were commercially successful (history of the winners). In Germany pretty much all you hear on the radio is music industry.

I think people would not even know how to handle it if eg the Beatles recordings would suddenly be free. They would probably still buy CDs in the stores.

bluedanieru3• 15 years ago

I fail to see how this holds any water at all, considering that music is free for a substantial number of people.

epscylonb3• 15 years ago

The pension argument is lame, if a performer wants a pension they should do what everybody else does, save for it.

abrahamsen• 15 years ago

Yes, "people will still play my present music in 60 years" is not something I would recommend as your pension plan.

sixtofour• 15 years ago

While it's not necessarily a solid plan, if your music attained popularity, it's not unreasonable to think it will be played regularly in sixty years.

Here in Denver (2M population in the larger metro area) there are at least:

- One AM swing/standards station (Benny Goodman etc) playing music from the thirties to the sixties.

- Two FM oldies stations, one of which is also AM, playing music from the fifties to the seventies.

- Two primarily classic rock FM stations and one progressive station that sits partly in their Venn diagram, playing music from the sixties to the eighties.

- A public FM station that plays folk/bluegrass/world, back to the thirties.

That's not to say that the retirement plan is any more solid than an NBA career, but the music itself, if it once had traction, will likely be played for a long time.

alan-crowe• 15 years ago

I remember listening to a documentary which interviewed the second tier of jazz, swing, and big-band musicians from the 1940's and 1950's. Along came the 1960's and rock and pop and they were sore out of luck. The top tier could still scrap a living, but not the rest.

Isn't that narrowing down, to a few super-stars who stand the test of time, quite typical? There must be lots of rock musicians from the 1970's who I cannot now remember and will never bother to listen to.

Musicians need to put some of their current income into a pension plan. They cannot expect to get royalties when they are old, whatever the duration of copyright.

tybris• 15 years ago

Apart from whether or not this is fair, I really hate the EU taking any part in this. I know their authority is not well-defined, but in my view they are overreaching. I've flipped from pro-EU to anti-EU on my voting agenda.

AdamJlovell• 15 years ago

It logically follows that the legislative body who produced this law would also have dreamed up the EU's anti-cookie law. It seems that Brussels sincerely doesn't understand the current role of technology in the world. It makes no sense to pass a law that will extend the enforcement period of a law that is relatively unenforceable today. Increasing the persons, actions or time-period to which a law applies, also increases the potential "criminal class" in the application of that law. This is effect these laws have/or will have on previously innocent populations.In this case a big portion of that population are the technology innovators. I have not spent anytime living in Europe, or paying attention to their pop-culture, but I find that this is a disturbing phenomenon. I imagine that if these laws have been able to pass through the EU legislature, they must somehow fit into a larger trend in European political culture. If these two laws are any indicator, I believe that they won't be the last to deter tech innovation and opportunity in Europe

EGreg• 15 years ago

Are musicians not incentivized enough in Europe? Or are we trying to incentivize music creation in 1950s and 60s? :P

I can see the court in Brussels going, "Mm, yes. I know what will motivate them to create better music! We'll make sure they own it when they are 105 years old! There's just too little good music these days, and this will make all the difference."

Joking. Obviously it's special interests pushing to make money from their 1950s creations after having been incentivized enough to make them in the first place, at the expense of the public.

noonespecial• 15 years ago

If you ever happen to find yourself wondering if copyrights are about to be extended again, just remember, The Beatles and Mickey Mouse will never be entering the public domain. Either of these events about to occur? Dude, you're getting an extension.

EU votes to extend music copyright to 70 years

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