Canadian Music Industry Confirms Once More That For Copyright Companies, Enough Is Never Enough
from the sounding-like-a-broken-record dept
One of the striking features of copyright is how over three centuries, it always seems to become longer, broader and stronger. Just as a matter of probabilities, you might expect copyright to become a little shorter once in a while, but strangely that doesn't appear to happen. One consequence of the copyright ratchet is that the public is often cheated. Copyright is based on a bargain: that a time-limited, government-backed intellectual monopoly will be granted to creators in return for allowing the work to enter the public domain at the end of that limited period. Instead, what has happened repeatedly is that the copyright term has been extended before works enter the public domain, thus denying society its promised payback. If anything deserves to be called "copyright theft", it is this.
The copyright ratchet is on display once more in a new op-ed Michael Geist has written for The Globe and Mail. He reports on some documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws, including a 30-page reform proposal from the Canadian Music Policy Coalition, an umbrella group representing 17 music associations. It's a submission to the Canadian government regarding a copyright review that is currently underway in that country. According to Geist, the document calls for:
radical changes that would spark significant new consumer fees and Internet regulation. The plan features new levies on smartphones and tablets, Internet service provider tracking of subscribers and content blocking, longer copyright terms, and even the industry's ability to cancel commercial agreements with Internet companies if the benefits from the deal become "disproportionate."
You can read the full details of how the Canadian music industry wants to ratchet copyright up a notch or two in Geist's post. With remarkable honesty, the report is entitled "Sounding Like a Broken Record", and the familiar demands to make copyright longer, broader and stronger are indeed tiresomely repetitive and anachronistic. But what makes those one-sided proposals to demand more money from the public, while depriving them of basic rights like privacy and freedom of speech, even more outrageous is the fact that the Canadian music industry is thriving under the current legal framework:
The Canadian music market is growing much faster than the world average, with Canada jumping past Australia last year to become the sixth largest music market in the world. Music collective SOCAN, a coalition member, has seen Internet streaming revenues balloon from [Canadian] $3.4 million in 2013 to a record-setting $49.3 million in 2017.
Moreover, data confirms that music piracy has diminished dramatically in Canada. Music Canada reports that Canada is below global averages for "stream ripping", the process of downloading streamed versions of songs from services such as YouTube. Last month Sandvine reported that file sharing technology BitTorrent is responsible for only 1.6 per cent of Canadian Internet traffic, down from as much as 15 per cent in 2014.
Since shrinking markets and increasing levels of unauthorized downloads are routinely used to justify a strengthening of copyright legislation, it seems only fair that the public should be allowed to argue that copyright law in Canada can be dialed back now that the reverse is taking place. But the music, film and publishing industries and their lobbyists would scream in horrified outrage if such a thing were even whispered. After all, everyone knows that when it comes to copyright, enough is never enough.
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Filed Under: canada, copyright, music industry
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Abolish Copyright
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Re: Abolish Copyright
Which of their arguments has any merit? Genuine question.
Okay, let's take a look:
It's property - if that's true it's leasehold, not freehold since it's supposed to sunset at some point.
Creators gotta live - if that's true how come so many rightsholders aren't actually creators?
Infringement is theft - if that's true they wouldn't still have the original, would they?
As a member of the public I'm appalled that they're continually allowed to get away with outright lying. We need to push back and hard. If this comes up for legislation, let's get on the phones and call our representatives. Pressure works.
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Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
Also note the number of "rightsholders" that never benefit from those rights, don't care or even know about them. When I email a friend, getting a copyright on that email is not an incentive. When people take photos of... well, everything (and all the time) these days... are they doing it to get copyright?
In other words, if copyright disappeared or were radically changed tomorrow (eg. requiring explicit paid registration, much shorter durations, forbidding DRM), what harm would we see? Would "regular" people even notice anything bad?
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Re: Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
There are undoubtedly a lot of problems in the entertainment industry, exploitative contracts, phony accounting, poor treatment of workers, rampant sexism, etc., but, fundamentally, entertainment as a business is here to stay, and entertainment as a business depends on copyright.
That said, if you haven't turned a profit after 14 years, you're not going to. There's no need for copyright terms to be so long, the incentives work just fine with reasonable copyright terms.
(I'm not going to get into copyright as applied to software, here. That's a whole other thing.)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
That's a ridiculous statement, contradicted by your next sentence. There are alternate models available. Yes, they're a mixed bag. Still, crowdfunding projects have raised large amounts of money even with the small minority of people willing to take that risk.
To go back to the question of "what harm would we see", budgets might decrease, maybe making "big budget blockbuster" movies impossible. But television worked for years "without copyright"—technically they had it, but it was common to have no recording or wipe the recordings. That model is straightforward to apply to crowdfunding without much risk: "we'll keep making new episodes until the time the show becomes unprofitable". If you walk around a comic con, you'll see no shortage of people willing to pay.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
given the unrelenting stream of crap that we have been treated to lately would anyone outside of the movie industry even care about that?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
Not really, just more of the same.
And please don't sue me for quoting you.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
Good. When can we start?
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Re: Without copyright we're thrown back to a patronage model
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Re: Re: Without copyright we're thrown back to a patronage model
A patron supports the creator to create new works, and does not demand the copyrights to be assigned to them. Also, patrons do not worry about who seen the works for free, or demand unique access to works because what they are supporting is the creation of new works.
Whether someone tries to go the publisher route, which is difficult because of publisher selectivity, or to go down the patronage route, they will likely have to produce several works before they earn any money. With the patronage model, self publishing works for free viewing starts the building of a fan base, and gains the feedback a creator needs to develop their art with no risk. Doing so when seeking to go down the publisher route risks alienating the early fan base when the latter works go behind a paywall on a different distribution channel.
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Addendum
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Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
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Re: Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
If loss of revenue is theft then competition is also theft.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Abolish Copyright
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why do i care aobut copyright
SEE WHAT YOU ARE BREADING
ME
until its reasonable term rates this will only get worse and nothng you do will help...
the war on society continues
oh and lets have a good talk about the rapists and sickos that are not only in movie and film but tv
will trudeau govt enable rapists and sickos ....
tune in next week
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Re: why do i care aobut copyright
Every Nation eatsw the Paint chips it Deserves!
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'Millions? Only MOST of the control? Bah.'
As stories like this highlight maximalists seems to strongly believe that if they aren't getting approximately all the money in existence(their product being the most valuable possible of course), and all of the control, then it will never be enough.
If they're not getting all the money, then they might as well be getting none. If they don't have complete control over the market, then they might as well have no stake in it at all. So obsessed with total control and all the profits anything less will never be enough, showing why 'just a little more, just a few tweaks to the law to 'protect creators' more' should always be refused, because it will never be enough.
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more statistcs
so in a 1.7 trillion economy music streaming is 49 million
the cdr levy used ot get them 46 million ten years ago
are cdrs stillmade how much is that gettign themnow 0?
there has not been any music in last 15 years i'd even consider buying even if there was no piracy and i honestly cant remember last time i downloaded music ....its all just garbage....
the streaming is form old music when the rights were not 80 years and people actually had to get off there butts and make music for a living , now you just put out tons a trash and get whatever streams and radio pays you.
same for movies and tv ....garbage
seriously game a thrones is good is it?
its soft core porn with a bunch a bad writing....
walking dead....kill me already....
im finding myself going back to classics more and more cause the new shit is just that SHIT
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Re: more statistcs
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Re: Re: more statistcs
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oh and sandvine is not tracking vpn use
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@anonymous
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Posthumous copyright extensions are fraud
That is fraud, bereaving the creators of their choice of impact on the world and breaking the deal they actually have made with the princes of the world.
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Re: Posthumous copyright extensions are fraud
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Re: Re: Posthumous copyright extensions are fraud
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As piracy grows Techdirt opposes limiting thefts in any way.
But what you'll see here every day here is just derision of any actual attempts to defend content that costs money, and to get some income from it.
In the US Constitution, a Right to EXCLUSIVE CONTROL is stated: Techdirt opposes that Right in every bit of practice, asserts that anyone can monetize content, it can be "shared" without limit on file hosts / torrent sites, and those who paid to make it can just wish up a "better business model" if want any income!
The actuality of Techirt is PRO-PIRATE, period.
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Re: As piracy grows Techdirt opposes limiting thefts in any way.
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Re:
In 8 years I never saw any evidence of it
And you wonder why other readers consider you a dangerous combination of obsessed and unhinged...
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Why do copyright fanatics care about media after they are dead?
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Re: Why do copyright fanatics care about media after they are dead?
Because the labels want old recordings to disappear, rather than enter the public domain to compete with new recordings. Just like Hollywood has allowed many old films to rot away in their vaults, so that they cannot enter the public domain.
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Re: Re: Why do copyright fanatics care about media after they are dead?
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Re: Re: Re: Why do copyright fanatics care about media after they are dead?
They know that, but they want to maximize the sales of the new, and that means eliminating the competition whenever they can.
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The general public already doesn't respect copyright and tightening it up still more won't make people respect it any more.
"If anything deserves to be called 'copyright theft', it is this."
I'd say that's a poor term. But if you accept that copyright is a contract for ideas and creative works being property. The basis of that contract is that the ideas actually belong to the society and culture to which they are born and the artist merely borrows them for a time. Then it stands to reason that "intellectual property theft" is the correct term and the perpetrators are actually the copyright holders by repeatedly refusing to release their borrowed ideas back to the public good, NOT the public for ignoring what amounts to a broken social contract.
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