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."
Lopsided interests -- I don't have much hope (Score:4, Interesting)
The public is large, poorly organized and difficult to motivate to make a stand on copyrights. Essentially the problem is that changing copyrights don't fundamentally change the lives of most people. For the general public this is a problem somewhat similar to the Tragedy of the Commons, in that the common man doesn't really benefit much from his own efforts, but rather from the collective efforts of all common men, which is only marginally reduced by him being lazy and not doing anything. Unfortunately, this is true of all common men and the result is a tendency to be apathetic.
For the copyright holders, the situation is reversed. There is a relatively small set of major copyright holders, they are well organized and well funded. With the clock ticking on their valuable assets, they are highly motivated to attempt to squeeze more out of the system, and their own efforts are likely to change their own bottom line. They stand to gain (or better said, not lose) vast amounts of money when copyright terms are extended, and are therefore willing to spend lots on lobbying, public relations and other activities to influence politicians.
In the middle we have the copyright extension opponents only hope: the various public and private organizations. They, unfortunately, tend to be underfunded compared to the copyright holders. Their task is to motivate the public, to donate money or lobby their politicians. Most of the public, as previously stated, are not really bothered by copyrights.
The more likely scenario, in my opinion, is that industry lobbying will ultimately be successful (perhaps after numerous attempts) and copyright term will become, for practical purposes, unlimited. Draconian laws will probably be implemented for copyright infringers. However, most of the public won't really care and will continue to illegally share films, music and other copyright content. The legal system will not make (in fact, will not be able to make) a sufficient effort to combat the problem, as the politicians probably don't think they will have to keep their promises to the industry in the long-term. There may also be a backlash from the judicial system and the public about the appropriateness of the effort and money spent on copyright infringers vs. other priorities.
The result will be, more or less, the mess we currently have.
There is an extremely small chance that there will be a small number of content providers who get it and realize that a new business model is required that is not based on trying to to maintain a legal lock on content. If they get enough of a foothold in the market, which will require overpowering the powerful Hollywood cartels (e.g. TV, movie and music distribution), this could a massive shift in the way content is marketed. This is more likely to happen in the book industry, as there less of a lock on the distribution channels, and we are seeming a gradual increase in self-publishing.
Re:Too little too late... (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed, neither the public benefit, nor the value of stimulating creativity varies depending on how long the original author lives.
Thus it's plain silly to award protection based on how long, or how short, the author might happen to live.
Instead, make a flat-and-simple rule. 20 years from date of first publication, for example.
The degree of reduced stimulation is tiny: there are very few works that pull in insufficient-to-be-worth-it money in the first 20 years, but enough-to-be-worth it in the first 100.
This is so because *most* works are either economically worthless from the get-go, OR they're successful, for a limited time, OR in some rare cases, they're successful for a long time. In all 3 cases, length of copyright makes no real difference. (aslong as it's atleast long enough to cover the "limited time")
This leaves the mythical beast: The work that never sells significantly in it's first 20 years, yet that goes on to become a hit later.
These -exist-, but there are very few of them, and to add insult to injury, you'd have to know or guess that a work falls in this category, for that knowledge to influence your decision (are you gonna produce the work, or not)
In todays economic climate I strongly suspect "this won't do well now, but could do better in 20 years" would map to "don't produce" anyway.
You lack imagination (Score:4, Interesting)
I can think of at least another whole round of warfare which you've forgotten. Once the media groups have a large computerized database of music which is effectively under permanent copyright, they can easily take any independent musician's music and run automated matching. Chances are that they will find a match good enough to take said musician to court, even if their chances of winning are small. Result? Said independent musician either folds and signs, or quits making music. I find it unlikely that, at least for the first 15-20 years of this strategy, that the courts would catch on to what was going on, and start to sanction the media groups for abusing the court system. Even with the strategy of spam-suing the consumer infringers (where there are orders of magnitude more of them than successful, creative, independent musicians), it's taking ages for the the US courts to figure out what is going on.
Re:Lopsided interests -- I don't have much hope (Score:4, Interesting)
That was a long rant but I think the short answer is that consumers are a pretty big force to be reckoned with anyway. There's a reason Spotify is in the scandinavian countries where piracy is at its highest. There's a reason he is a MEP from the Pirate Party. I very much doubt you can *force* people to stop pirating, no matter how much you make a mockery of justice. And the courts here will never do a Thomas-Rasset and award 2 million dollars for sharing a few songs. That's what we give to people that have been innocently jailed for 15 years, smashed up real good in car accidents and that sort of thing. Even the four TPB leaders got less than 2 million dollars/person and that is still under appeal and TPB is still running. So they can own the whole playground but they still have to make terms that make the consumers want to play. We're not at the end of the bandwidth revolution, we've really just started. Take a look at this graph [www.ssb.no]. That's the average and mean broadband bandwidth from 2004 and until today here in Norway. It's only going one way - up, up and away. You haven't seen anything yet, when everyone is on 10-100Mbit connections then you'll know true P2P. Also unlike the US "up to" those are pretty much real speeds with no silly caps.
Re:Hummm... What? (Score:4, Interesting)
A tiny fraction of all music lasts that long. Elvis Presley's music is owned by a German record company today, and it was largely to protect that record company's business and employees that copyright was extended the last time, a year or two ago. And as a result, the remaining 99,9% of music becomes locked in by copyright and rots away in libraries and private collections for yet another few decades.
Re:Hummm... What? (Score:4, Interesting)
If its good enough then people will continue to consume quality media products.
Beethoven's music is still fairly popular.
Charles Dickens books are still being printed.
Michael Faraday's inventions are still in use (after further development and refinement).
Of course, history would probably be different if those 3 examples were heavily restricted and limited in their use.
Where would Disney get their stories from if copyright existed on all those fairy stories they corrupted?
Re:Hummm... What? (Score:5, Interesting)
We live in a democratic society. And since at least 1982, a "democracy" has meant a free market consumer economy, operating on top of a nominally free and representative society. Democracy has hitched itself to marketism and the two are by now, probably inextricably linked.
Every decision, every strategy, every policy and certainly every election in the modern democracy is focused around one thing: the economy. Nothing else matters; nothing. Not society, not progress, not religion, not justice, not equality, not fraternity, not libertyâ"nothing matters but the economy.
So I don't know how people can really complain here. We live in a democracy and that means the economy comes first. If longer copyrights are better for the economy, meaning that they make profit for private companies, then they will be extended. Nothing else matters. The economy comes first, now and always, above all other things, Amen.
Re:Good luck (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know what it means over there, but here in the 'States, when they say an official is "a communist" that means he only wants to give $50 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies to the biggest privately-owned corporations instead of $100 billion.
Either that, or his skin is a few shades darker than theirs.