Makes me wonder why musicians still think they need record companies. Musicians have Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, etc to show off their music and build up a rep for their music
F*ck the record companies!
Iâm pretty sure that within my lifetime Iâll see the industrialized nations move to never expiring copyrights. Nothing will ever go into public domain again.
âSonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ⌠As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valentiâs proposal for term to last forever less one day.â
None of the people named there are actual content creators, are they? Couldnât they line up some starving artists to work as spokesartists?
Also, I hope somebody pointed out to Valenti that âinfinity minus oneâ is not actually a number.
Iâd love to help you out, sir. Which way did you come in?
Well, the Sonny was Sonny Bono, the out of tune half of Sonny & Cher⌠
Yup. Though I donât think we should allow content creators to decide how long copyright should last, either. Since they have every incentive for it to last forever, the same way the big corps do.
Very few âcontent creatorsâ are creating content whole cloth out of thin air. Almost all artistic work is built upon a foundation of earlier work. Fair Use and limited copyright are essential to the future of all artistic endeavors.
I agree 100%. But many content creators donât. Particularly ones who havenât created any new content of any worth in 20 years or more.
I know, but Mary Bono was no part at all of Sonny and Cher.
Other than receiving royalties as part of Sonnyâs estateâŚ
Totally agree. A few years ago I read an interesting article featuring an economist talking about copyright duration. He had analyzed the whole economic picture; artistâs revenue, cultural cost & benefit, all sorts of things.
He determined that copyright should most logically be tied to the difficulty of duplication. In the era where one needed to build a multi-million dollar factory to press vinyl to duplicate a record or make a film to film transfer of a movie, copyright should last longer than when one needed only wait thirty minutes to make a cassette of a thirty minute album or 2 hours to tape a 2 hour movie.
Copyright should be even shorter when one can reproduce a 60 minute CD or DVD in 5 minutes or so. Even shorter with copying an audio or video file to a hard drive. I recall his optimal âCD eraâ copyright was around 5 years. With few exceptions, a song/book/movie⌠will make the most revenue when itâs first released and pretty much exponentially decay after that, with shorter and shorter time constants as technology & tastes evolve faster & faster.
Cutting copyright would reduce most artistsâ revenue by a per cent or so over the lifetime of the work. The ones it might take a bigger bite out of are far more successful anyway, and can well afford a somewhat larger hit. (The 1% of the music world?)
A musician friend of mine is adamantly for longer copyright. âthis is the legacy Iâll leave to support my childrenâ. My response is that unless youâre the Beatles or something like that, itâs not going to make one whit of difference to your kids.
Then he might want to invest the money he makes while he is alive rather than rely on copyright law.
Iâm for copyright for the lifetime of the original artist and then public domain when they exit from life stage right. If they didnât leave anything for the kiddies, eh.
What about use in ads, movies etc? A guy I worked with wrote a song that was a hit in 1980, ten years later a coffee company used it in an ad. The money he got from that paid off his mortgage.
A five year copyright would see advertisers and film makers only using music that is five years or older. At fifty weâd see a lot of Elvis and early Beatles being used, at seventy the most modern would be Glen miller.
What about it? Sure, there are some works that have profitable lives far longer than average. Good for them! But for every hit 80s song that is still making someone money, there are thousands that arenât. Thousands that, however much or little, made 99.9% of all the income theyâll ever produce within five years or less.
Do we want to make tax laws that benefit the very rich at the expense of the poor?
Do we want to make copyright law that benefits the Disneys of the world at the expense of culture? (Check out the state of Canadaâs documentary film industry, for example.)
Do you really think a five year copyright would result in the upcoming Star Wars movie having the Black Eyes Peasâ Boom Boom Pow or some such being used as R2-D2âs theme song, because they could save a few tens of thousands of dollars out of the $200,000,000 budget?
At current copyright limitations, why donât we see more Edison recordings used in advertisements and movies?
That was my point. Recordings that old have nobody around that remembers them, but music from the 60s and later are attractive to advertisers because they trigger fond memories in baby boomers. Music from 5 years ago is pretty indistinguishable from todayâs. Sure, Star Wars wouldnât use a pop song from a few years ago, but Guardians of the Galaxy", Shrek and just about everything Martin Scorsese ever did has, so why shouldnât those artists benefit.
Under your suggested model, Sixto RodrĂguez (who was ripped off by his record company the first time around) would not be getting the benefit of his being rediscovered.
I think itâs completely fair that ESG and the Raincoats get some money from my last 2 purchases . Most people complaining about copyright seem to be a bunch of petulant babies who want everything for free.
Well, new music is also music that no one remembers, you havenât even heard it yet.
Point is, you can pick all the individual examples you want of artists that got ripped off or that could have made more money had copyright been extended one, two, five, ten ⌠years. (Or not been reduced.)
But there are tens of thousands of artists who would lose nothing. In fact, they stand to gain⌠Some film maker without a budget to commission music finds just the right music in the public domain from the recent past, uses it in her film, people see the film, wonder where that haunting melody came from, check out the artist, who doesnât happen to be dead, buys their latest album, PROFIT!
Again, this economist was looking at the BIG PICTURE of how best to have copyright benefit EVERYONE.
And remember, just because a work is out of copyright, doesnât mean people wouldnât necessarily pay for it.
For years Laurie Anderson had her music available on her website under three different prices. The standard 99 cents per track, a la Apple store; free; and âpay what you wantâ after listening to it. She also tracked what folks paid.
About one in six people chose free, but even then, the average amount people exchanged her songs for was $1.17, even more than the standard list price. So you can claim that those who complain about the length of copyright just want something for nothing, that doesnât make it true.
No, the state of the music industry makes it true. Anyway this is largely irrelevant. Just type âfull albumâ into YouTube and youâll see how many people are getting their music free without having.to wait fifty years.
Aside from the fact that many people use youtube to sample a low quality version of an album in order to decide whether or not they want to actually purchase it, extending copyright for longer and longer solves this âproblemâ how?
