Why Didn't UK Deal With Ridiculous Copyright Term Lengths?
from the good-question dept
While we've been surprised that the UK government actually appears to support putting in place much of the Hargreaves' report's recommendations, we've noted from the beginning that the report really seemed to pull its punches at times. That may have been politically necessary, but it's good to see at least some in the UK pointing out that there are even larger problems with the copyright system that the government is not addressing. Shane Richmond, at The Telegraph, has an excellent article that highlights how copyright is an "outdated law that puts a cap on creativity." While it covers a few different issues, a key point is the ridiculous length of copyright law today:This situation is essentially ridiculous. A copyright period that extends beyond the life of the author is clearly not an incentive to create – whatever rewards you offer, John Lennon is unlikely to write any more songs (although the music industry did include the names of several dead musicians among the 4,000 whom it listed in 2006 as supporting a further extension, so perhaps it might work after all).Separately, he calls out the traditional industry gatekeepers and lobbyists for pretending that they've been arguing in the best interests of the artists, when copyright law is often getting in the way of artists instead:
Even as far back as the 18th century, publishers knew that arguing for a legal monopoly for their products was unlikely to succeed. So they framed the argument around the artists and got what they wanted. Today’s arguments, whether in favour of copyright extensions or against “piracy”, are always couched in the same terms: it’s about protecting artists and creators.It's pretty amazing (and surprising) to see this in a mainstream UK publication. Hopefully people pay attention.
But copyrights are now increasingly likely to be owned by corporations, not by individuals. These companies will argue that they have invested in creativity, even if they didn’t do the creating themselves. But very often, they simply bought the rights from a company that once invested in some long-dead artist, or from that artist’s relatives. It’s not about creativity, it’s about revenue – which is perhaps why, in the US, copyright extensions have tended to happen whenever Disney is about to lose the exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse.
As it stands, the true purpose of copyright has been subverted. In fact, it’s now an active disincentive to create.
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It's official, the first Elder Sign ahs been scrawled.
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It sure is refreshing though. Maybe we'll die happily knowing MAFIAA has finally understood what's copyright all about and that file sharing is good. NOT.
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Compare to the location of Rl'yeh.
Lovecraft was close enough!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
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i just looked up rl'yeh and the location of the bloop, wow! weird! they are both in almost exactly the same spot
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This is a silly straw man that you guys throw out all too often. The incentivizing takes place before the creation, not after it. Obviously no one is incentivized to create something after they've already created it.
The fact that you even put forth this argument at all, Mike, shows that you'll grasp onto anything in your desperate attempts to discredit IP. It's hilarious.
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Soooooo.... you're saying that the prospect of keeping a corporation you've never heard of in cash 50 years after you die inspires you to write a song? OK.... weird, but at least it has more internal logic than most counter arguments in here.
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Now, get back on that Ouija board so John Lennon can write me some new songs.
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Then we definitely don't need longer copyright terms.
The copyright terms that were in place were more than enough incentive for all the creating that had been done for decades.
When the next copyright extension argument comes up, we need to remember your very words. The incentives already in place are enough to have created all that is being created. More is being created today than ever before -- it's is only the dinosaur industry that is not getting monopoly rents it feels entitled to.
Beyond that, the really good content is created as a result of passion, regardless of how many years after death that copyright may last.
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I think your incorrect, much of the incentives are collected after it is created, and collected and collected and collected.
The ideas and concepts are locked away making sure nothing new can be imagined using those ideas.
The ideas grow stagnant and are treated as something that must remain untouched, well unless the rightholder can find a new way to wring some more money out of it or sue someone who had a similar idea.
How many amazing ideas that were inspired by those artists who came before them have been squashed to protect the original 75 years later?
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What incentive got John Lennon to create the songs that people liked?
What incentive had him pick up a guitar, learn to sing old blues and rhythm songs, and become a sensation?
Even better, what incentive guaranteed that the songs they sang would become international hits?
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All of this right to copy/distribute is a red herring for the real issue, the loneliness and frustrations of the single artist.
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So you agree that copyright should expire on the death of the creator then. Good, that's a starting point.
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And yet we extended copyright RETROACTIVELY. How did THAT incentivize anything?
50 years is plenty. 50 years gives plenty of time to profit off the work and plenty of incentive to create. Nobody is going to say, "I'm not going to see that in the theater, I'm going to wait until 2061 when it becomes public domain."
How many businesses, when buying or creating new works, worry about how much profit will be generated by that work 50 years in the future? Of course they don't. The odds are against the work still being popular, and 0% of the people working at that company are still going to be working there 50 years later (assuming the company even still exists.)
Ever calculate the current value of profits you won't see for 50+ years? It's much, much lower than the raw amount of profits that you'll actually get. No sane person would treat that as a real incentive for creation.
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" These companies will argue that they have invested in creativity, even if they didn’t do the creating themselves. But very often, they simply bought the rights from a company that once invested in some long-dead artist, or from that artist’s relatives. It’s not about creativity, it’s about revenue"
What the writer fails to understand is that the smaller company invested in the artist, and may or may not have made a return. They have created value, and it's that value that they are selling on. The smaller company may or may not have recouped their investments, and selling the value on to others is part of the business model.
It isn't any different from (in the UK, example) selling a house that is on a 99 year leasehold. They own something of value, they invested in it, and now they are selling it.
To deny business the right to own content, or to deny them the right to sell it on would be to obstruct free market business. That would be incredibly sad.
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And copyright is meant to balance the rights of society, what exactly do these massively long copyrights offer society other than a public domain completely devoid of anything new entering it.
Oh thats right we get the special right of being charged multiple times for portions of our shared culture and the right to face lawsuits if we decide to build something from the inspiration we find in those creations.
Seems fair.
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At 75 years, example, copyright is effectively "length of life", and that anyone who was around when it was created is unlikely to be able to profit from it in the public domain, except perhaps in their old age. What is in the public domain today (that huge, massive public domain) is all from pre-20th century for the most part. At some point, much of the current material will be part of the public domain, for the next generations to enjoy.
I cannot see a reason to make copyright shorter, except perhaps for the greed of the current rimix style artists who are running short of material to work from. Oh yeah, Nina Paley might need a music track for her next movie.
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I'll bite. What is your defined threshold for profit for it to be considered enough of a value to hold perpetually extending copyright ownership?
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So when that leasehold is extended at the expense of the public, your logic says that the public should be compensated. Funny, I don't remember that happening on any of the multiple copyright extensions that have occurred in the last 50 years.
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"I cannot see a reason to make copyright shorter, except perhaps for the greed of the current rimix style artists who are running short of material to work from."
Remix artists like, say, Walt Disney Studios? Their last original work was Fantasia. There is a reason tropes exist, you know.
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Thus the basis for new culture is, in fact, copy-culture.
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Only because the rules keep getting changed. Not a justification. Most pre-1970 works would be in the public domain if the rules had not been changed from when those works were produced. Meanwhile how many 20th century works are rotting away or unreleasable because of current copyright laws? A lot.
"I cannot see a reason to make copyright shorter"
I know, you've already shown many times that you have no concept of the value of art and no imagination. I'll give you one - orphaned works. There's many more if your imagination is still broken.
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So when Disney took public domain fairy tales and slightly tweaked and remixed them they were just being greedy. Then they used copyright laws to block anyone else who wanted to build off of the same fairy tales, because they were Disney ideas now.
So when Nina did it she is greedy, but Disney doing it is good.
Did you eat alot of paint chips as a kid?
As many people have pointed out, everything is a remix.
Things are built on top of others ideas, that does not destroy the original and might even increase interest in the original.
There is very little gained for the benefit of society by creating these massive pools of IP, to be locked away or lost... look at the recordings being lost by the Library of Congress because the laws are so screwed up that creating a copy to save it is illegal.
It is better to have something lost forever, than to fix a very broken system and restore the balance between society and the creators.
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You buy a house, then you sell it later for (hopefully) a profit. You retain exclusive rights to that house but you also don't expect to get paid in between times (unless you rent it out, in which case you lose direct use of it anyway and the analogy gets messy). In the meantime, the architects, builders, electricians, etc. who built the house also don't expect to get paid each time you use it, nor do their children expect a cut.
There's more differences between that and copyright than there are similarities, even if you consider both "property".
"To deny business the right to own content, or to deny them the right to sell it on would be to obstruct free market business."
Nobody's trying to deny them that right. What they are trying to do is stop the ridiculous monopoly lengths. You can still make money of public domain material, it's just that other can as well. But, if the product is hundreds of years old, what's the incentive to make more? If the incentive is that the new stuff is deemed more valuable, why the excessive copyright lengths?
"That would be incredibly sad."
You want sad? Look at the areas of entertainment where profit & creating "product" has replaced the urge to make art for art's sake. The artists are being edged out in favour of easily manufactured material they can peddle for the next century. That's sad.
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I would simply deny the (artificial) concept of content being owned. Ownership of a house makes sense because, practically speaking, only one person (or small group) can benefit from it at a time. However there is no limit on the number of people that can benefit from an abstract thing, and so that concept of ownership makes no sense.
Now content created by a person does have an unbreakable link with that person - but you cannot sell the authorship of a work to someone else, it makes no sense.
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Saying copyright helps the free market is like saying you need to kill your wife in the next three seconds or she won't live another year. It's completly nonsensical.
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Copyright
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Until the UK and the US acceded to Berne and subsequent treaties, both of them had much, much shorter terms. In the US is was 28 years, plus one extension if sought for an additonal 28 years. In the UK the term was somewhat similar.
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Absolutely
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For only one of the reasons I thought
Unfortunately I was correct in my other assumption: the EU. The EU/a> now controls the term lengths in the UK. I think there is a possibility of shortening (slightly) the length of copyright on works published prior to 1995 - but that is all.
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Re: For only one of the reasons I thought
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Peter Pan - the copyright that never grew up!
Yes - I remember the debate. All the pro-copyright people said "It's terrible Gt Ormond St. Hospital will lose out when the copyright expires - so we must extend the term. (By the way that will extend OUR terms as well - but I hope you don't notice that)".
When what they should have said was "It's terrible Gt Ormond St. Hospital will lose out when the copyright expires So one of us should repeat JM Barrie's generous gesture and donate the copyright on a newer work as a replacement".
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Copyright "puts a cap on creativity"? -- Not if you create new.
I'm against copying when mere remix and mash up, and I'm also against corporations! What those have in common is that other than the creator attempts to profit.
@ AC who wrote "obstruct free market business" -- that'd be GOOD. What's needed is to restrain big business because bigness always works against FAIRNESS.
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Re: Copyright "puts a cap on creativity"? -- Not if you create new.
Coming up next thread...
Big Business binds businesses with Bigness binders.
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Relating copyright term to life span of the author
This is not true. If people can pass on something of value to their children, then that's clearly an incentive. One could perhaps phrase it like this: why should an old person who may not have as many years left to live as a young person be given less incentive (through copyright) to create?
I think it's a strategic mistake to argue that copyright should end when the author dies, because once you have bought in to the idea that there is a connection between coypright term and the author's lifespan it gets more difficult to argue that the copyright term should be shorter than an average life span.
Just let the copyright term be short and of fixed duration.
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Re: Relating copyright term to life span of the author
More reasonable - BUT there will always be hard cases with a short term (authors whose work only becomes popular after a delay) and the pro-copyright lobby will haul out some sob story or other and get the term extended again.
Personally I have come to the conclusion that copyright simply needs to be abolished. It is the legacy of our technological history and would not be invented today if we were starting from scratch (without the legal and psychological baggage of the last 300 years).
As it stands copyright cannot be enforced except at great cost both financial and in terms of the crippling of technology. Those costs are born either by those customers who abide by the rules - or by the general public and I can see no good reason to burden either of them.
In the modern world there are other, better ways to incentivise (though I doubt that that is really necessary) and reward creators.
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And Humble Indie did it again!
They keep putting stuff for free on the fire-and-pray scheme of things and they keep coming up with millions of dollars in donations.
Why do copyright needs to exist again?
Oh that is right because Big companies like to steal the little guys.
http://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-studios-sued-for-pirating-a-movie-script-110804/
Also Felicia Day is becoming something of a mega star in her own right and all she does is give things away for free.
http://blogs.forbes.com/davidewalt/2011/08/03/felicia-day-dragon-age-redemption/
And she is making more money than when she worked as a real actress with agents, going to interviews and so on LoL
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Treaties are guidelines, just ask the US about the ABM treaty of 1972 LoL
Quote:
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty
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