Horror Of Horrors: Rock Music To Hit The Public Domain In Europe
from the lock-the-doors!--hide-your-daughters! dept
While the US locks up copyrighted works for longer than could possibly be reasonable thanks to our friends at the Walt Disney Company and the Sonny Bono "Keep Mickey Locked Up" Act, over in Europe they have dared to go with a horrifying 50 year copyright. Why is it horrifying? Well, it appears that fifty years ago popular rock and roll began, and that means plenty of those songs are about to hit the public domain. Of course, the music industry folks could never let that happen, which is why they're lobbying hard for a Sonny Bono copyright term extension act of their own, because the thought of Elvis Presley's or the Beatles songs entering the public domain scares the living daylights out of the industry. They've convinced Reuters to write up a very one-sided piece that never talks to anyone who might point out why there's a limit on the length of copyright, and how stuff in the public domain is important to our culture. Is anyone over in Europe complaining about how Shakespeare's works are in the public domain? However, Reuters digs up some random musician to say: "It's scary." It's scary? This is a musician who is on "a 37-date sold-out tour." You're on a sold out tour, making plenty of money, and you're complaining that you won't get your royalties from something you did fifty years ago? In most lines of business, you get paid for what you're doing today, not what you did fifty years ago. Update: Ernest Miller points out that if the entire point of copyright is to incentivize people to create, then no one should care. The material was created already, so it worked: "I can safely say that extending copyright for existing recordings is highly unlikely to incentivize the creation of more music in the 1950s and 60s."
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
That's dodging the point, the issue is how affecting copyright will affect music being made today, the theory being that longer copyrights will encourage music production, and shorter copyrights will retard music production.
Of course as the material gets older it looses value, and the value of the protection decreases, they giving a law of diminishing returns effect to the extension of copyright.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Music from 50 years old goes
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Everywhere in Europe...?
So the Beatles' great-great-grandchildren can rest assured. Even if Macca and Ringo (assuming they actually co-wrote anything and are still alive) keeled over dead tonight, no Beatles songs would enter the public domain until 2074. Yes, we're all very progressive in Europe...
Quick extra note: Copyright law is pretty much determined by international law (treaties and stuff), and I know for a fact that the rule is the same in the Netherlands. Odds are that other European countries are equally "free thinking". :-/
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Dodging the Point
[ link to this | view in thread ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Let it expire!!!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
me
[ link to this | view in thread ]