Europeans! EU set to extend music copyright duration!
Glyn sez,
The EU Commission will be meeting shortly (possibly as soon as Wednesday) and formally accepting DG Internal Market's proposal to extend the term of Copyright in sound recordings. Once accepted the legislative initiative will proceed through the Council of Ministers and EU parliament. As you would expect the Open Rights Group and EFF are hard at work lobbying against this and they would like your help. Please follow the link and sign the petition.Link (Thanks, Glyn!)The EU is doing this despite their own findings, the findings of the UK government's independent analysis and advice of Europe's leading intellectual research centres.
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The only way to stop it is to become Batman.
The EU make all the decisions bt you never read about what they are up to in the newspapers. Accident?
or conspiracy? dahh daah dahh dahh duum duum!
Don't hold your breath waiting for Batman... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Enterprises#Wayne_Entertainment
or are you american? we already had the post on BB about how if it doesn't happen in the US or Iraq, you probably don't hear about it in the US.
And I just love how despite all the evidence going against the assumptions of politicians regarding copyright, they still go ahead with legislations based on their assumptions. What, the facts are in error?
Europeans shrug: EU is globalization and oligarchy. Who are surprised? Only foolish Americans perhaps.
I'm so tired of these morons... They don't understand that they are destroying the very culture they think they are protecting with these legislations.
Right now countless of works are locked away in archives, and will never see the light of day again, because the rights haven't expired, but no-one knows who owns the rights. Thus you can't use it.
And with this RETROACTIVE law it would take it even longer before they hit the public domain.
This law is no longer used for promoting creativity, but rather laziness. And then mostly of the recording industry... who wants to keep making money for ever for something that someone made long ago.
Besides, 95 years is just ludicrous.
A 5 year old can then enjoy fruits of his labour until he's 100.
15 years is long enough! 15 years of monopoly on the work, and after that it's for the public.
rant.
Are any of you people actually composers?
Honestly, everyone loves music and wants it all the time but some of you figure it's all right for you to decide when or if you feel like paying for it. Composers are not all the incredibly wealthy people that free-music advocates (consisting largely of people who don't make music and people who can't sell their own music) seem to drag out for these demonstrations...As if a rock band who sells a lot of records because people love the music doesn't deserve to be compensated in the most democratic way possible, as opposed to some jerk saying "well, lots of other people in the public paid for this... and I'm one of the public... so that kind of means I deserve to have it for free, doesn't it?" Well, no, it doesn't. If you don't like what a product costs you or the strings that are attached to it, buy something else.
And "locking something away in an archive" that someone else wrote is killing culture? No - not writing anything worth listening to, or worse, killing the economy for a songwriter by reducing the value of their work is killing culture. Why do you need the works of other people in order for your culture to go ahead unless you're a consumer only? Is it because you need it for your next mashup that you'll be distributing without crediting or compensating the composer? Not every advance in music comes from groovy kids who "don't care about money" or "reject corporate culture" or some tired garbage like that - a lot of it comes from people like, say, Raymond Scott who were hard-working career musicians who made a living doing that like any of you do going to your jobs every day. Radiohead doing what they did, for example, was marketing pure and simple, a numbers game played by wealthy people that they were statistically likely to win.
If you object to the fact that big companies seem to have controlling interest in many artists' work, okay, I'll go along with that. But just because artists don't get to exploit all that they might doesn't mean that non-music-writing, whiny theoretical "copyfighters" should have any right to use it as they see fit, justifying that by bitching about big corporations or governments.
If you are generating anything that's worth preserving, you'll want to have the right to get a return on your work. And as the law stands, if someone wants to cover your song, they can, without question, as long as they give you something for it. What's the problem with that? Musicians are generally poor most of their lives - it would certainly be nice to know that if you wrote something twenty years ago or more and it winds up making some money now that you aren't eating cat food in your old age while someone else makes money off of it. This is not about laziness on the part of the composer, it's about greediness on the part of whiny consumers.
15 years is long enough? Would it have been long enough for you if it were your money? As you say, a five year old could enjoy the fruits of his/her LABOR for a lifetime. This is work for those of us who actually create things.