EU About To Vote On Copyright Extension 143
ConfusedVorlon writes "According to Christian Engström (Pirate MEP), 'Monday or Tuesday this upcoming week there will be another round in the fight against prolonging the copyright protection term for recorded music in the EU. Now is an opportunity to contact MEPs, Members of the European Parliament, and persuade them to vote against the term extension."
Too little too late... (Score:5, Informative)
List of EU countries with Life+70 or more: UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Finland, etc
My point is this law actually does nothing at all...
Re:Hummm... What? (Score:4, Informative)
That's not how digitalized works work. A real product can be put to an end by the company, because if the company stops to produce the product, the product is gone (except maybe for second hand/eBay). If the old music goes into public domain, now everyone can sell it.
The big music industry is lobbying for extended copyright just to prevent old music become public domain so they can make music a scarce product. They want to be the only entity that have control over the distribution of music.
What would happen if copyright would be 15 years or less? We would have a lot of small music distributors that profit from old music, and a lot of small music distributors that profit from new music. The music industry would come closer to a "free market" with lots of market members compete with each other.
That is the worst nightmare for entities like the BMG and other groups. There are only 4 big record labels in the whole world, each have almost equal market share and they are dominating with 70% the music market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_music_market#Statistics [wikipedia.org]
That is a lot of concentration of capital in the hands of a few. 3 are based in the USA and one in the UK. You can see how much money they can put in to legislation in countries were such buy-off of laws is the norm.