Dead Musicians Signing Media Rights Petitions

epeus writes "Following from the Gowers coverage and the Musicians' ad in the FT, Larry Lessig admits he was wrong about term extension: 'If you read the list, you'll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead (e.g. Lonnie Donegan, died 4th November 2002; Freddie Garrity, died 20th May 2006). I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues to inspire. I'm not yet sure how. But I guess I should be a good sport about it, and just confess I was wrong. For if artists can sign petitions after they've died, then why can't they produce new recordings fifty year ago?'"

Obligatory Simpsons Quote

Oh no! The dead have risen and they're voting for copyright extension

Re:Obligatory Simpsons Quote

Thankfully many of us have spent dozens of hours practising zombie destruction in computer games like dead rising and are well-versed in their destruction. I'll go after zombie Elvis if someone else wants to get zombie Freddy Mercury.

Re:Obligatory Simpsons Quote

Then go after zombie Michael Jackson. He even claims to be still alive.

Re:Obligatory Simpsons Quote

No way. I don't want that zombie AIDS shit getting on me...

Hey man, you get bit and you're screwed anyway, whats it matter? Is there a lot of stigma in the zombie community about zombies with AIDs or something?

Re:Obligatory Simpsons Quote

Oh no! The dead have risen and they're voting for copyright extension

What's wrong with that? After all, they got many advantages from the copyright system. I'd call'em the grateful dead.
*ducks*

they should have a whip round

i wonder what the net worth of these 4500 "artists" are ?

then compare it with the net worth of 4500 Wallmart shop employees or 4500 Ford car plant workers who wont be getting paid either for work they did 50 years ago

perhaps the music industry needs a close audit to see where those 4500 poor, poor starving musicians are going wrong
if you have nothing to hide as they say...

Re:they should have a whip round

...getting paid for work you did a long time ago.

More precisely, that is collecting on deferred benefits they contracted for in return for their work long ago. It is a straight forward exchange of benefits for work.

In the case of extending copyrights, the beneficiaries are trying to get something for nothing.

Re:they should have a whip round

One would hope that the record companies and "musicians" favor extending copyright because their recordings are still selling and making money

If they want to make more money, they can get their asses back into the recording studio. That's what copyright is for.

Re:they should have a whip round

...extending copyright because their recordings are still selling and making money

These entities are free to sell and make money from these recordings in perpetuity without copyright extensions. They just won't be able to demand as much after the government enforced monopoly expires.

Re:they should have a whip round

Right, but they knew the copyright terms when they chose to do the work, now they're trying to change them after entering into the bargain with society. It's more like a long-retired worker deciding that his pension just isn't enough and trying to rewrite his contract.

The reason it works with copyright is because those who sell the recordings stand to gain an enormous amount while those they're bargaining with (i.e., all the citizens) each loses a comparatively small amount. The net effect is still bad for society overall (imo) but it's harder to get someone excited about defending society as a whole.

Re:they should have a whip round

No, you don't understand. In the case of the factory workers, they deserve their pensions because it was part of the agreed-upon compensation at the time of hire. It's just a matter of enforcing a preexisting agreement.

In contrast, these musicians want to retroactively change the agreement, even though they were aware of the terms and willingly agreed to them (by publishing the music) before.

In other words, the first group wants what is owed to them while the second group wants what is not owed to them. It is entirely a matter of petty greed!

not just that...

I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues to inspire.

I don't see why Lessig is so surprised. Not only can the dead sign petitions, but they can vote, too. America has lead the way in the legal frontier of corpse-rights and suffrage, at least as far back as the 1800s.

Remember, this is not just about the Royalties...

They're using every means possible to ensure their copyright gets extended. If copyright is not extended it will have a huge negative effect on the record companies / British Phonographic Industry (BPI), RIAA groups and content distributors, beyond that of royalties paid.

Content in the public domain waters down the argument for requiring ALL content to be 'protected'. If half of the worlds music was public domain, lobbyists would have a hard time persuading lawmakers to put restrictions on ALL devices. This has been evident with the RIAA continuously argue why DRM is required for ALL music to prevent copyright infringement. These arguments usually fail to recognize the existence of non-copyrighted music (Creative Commons, Public Domain etc), and certainly make no provision for it in their argument or 'industry drafted bills' (e.g DMCA). This results in systems like the Zune wi-fi sharing system which applies DRM when transferring songs, whether the media requires protection or not, and with total disregard for other licences such as 'copyleft' which may expressly forbid it.

We've seen from the Napster and Gokster cases in the 'war on file sharing' argued that "file sharing is always infringement of somebody's copyright", and fails to recognize the legal uses of file sharing systems. Again, if half of the worlds music was public domain, the argument agaisnt services like Bit-torrent is significantly watered down. Services like Youtube and Google Video have already been targeted, and we've seen media companies desire to shutdown the service altogether. Although Youtube and Google video are exceptional in that they've been careful to prevent copyright infringement from the start, and the result has been for the media companies attempts to re-define infringement. (i.e teenagers lip-sinking etc). Again their aim is to prove the majority of content that is free is infringing copyright and the services providing it should be shut-down.

We are seeing the music industry / BPI "pulling out all the stops" to prevent an extension of copyright. They're using artists that have done very very well out of record company who may 'win the hearts and minds of the people' (Cliff Richard), and now their padding their 'stats' with dead people. It is certain they are lobbying politicians as fast as they can.

The BPI (and RIAA) have responsibilities "in the collection, administration and distribution of music licenses and royalties" which relies on a vast library of content being under their control. Music that is currently in their control placed in the public domain erodes their breadth of responsibility and will ultimately affect their cut of the royalties.

This argument is not about the artists getting more money, it is about the BPI and RIAA retaining their value and ability to "fight the crime of music theft".

They cannot fight the "crime" if half the time it is perfectly legal to copy and share.

Re:Remember, this is not just about the Royalties.

The material does not even have to be in the public domain for it to "water down" the argument for all content to be protected. Works released under licences such as Creative Commons, which allow (sometimes with restrictions) copying and sharing while still retaining copyright, also water down the argument. In fact they add something new to 'pot'. If DRM is mandated (such that players will only play DRM protected content) then the DRM 'system' will have to handle the situation where the rights owner does allow copying, sampling etc. This would, of course, include putting no restrictions on content which is in the public domain either because the copyright has expired or it has been deliberately placed in the public domain.

Boycott Cliff this Christmas

Cliff Richard is the face of the multi-national companies who want to destroy fair use, remixing, amateur music and anything they cannot control. Therefore lets boycott Cliff this Christmas, refuse to listen to his crappy contrived whining. The last thing we want to do is to "incentivise" Cliff Richard to produce new songs.

Re:Boycott Cliff this Christmas

Think Ned Flanders with a guitar.

I don't see what the big deal is here.

Of course, I'm from Chicago. The dead regularly climb out of the ground to vote up here...must be something in the water...

makes me wonder..

Makes me wonder how 2pac or Biggie would feel about this. I guess we'll find out on their next albums!

Reminds me of a Monty Python song

... called "Decomposing Composers".

Although in this case I think they're recomposing composers.

2Pac doesn't need to do this

Instead of signing petitions, why don't they just release a couple new albums like 2Pac? It's totally paying for the henny and the hos in the afterlife.

Whenever you hear "corporation" or "association"

Remember that corporations meet almost every criteria for being psychopaths [wikipedia.org] that doesn't involve age or sexuality (Jokes about getting raped at the pump notwithstanding).

Pathological lying, conning/manipulative, shameless, parasitic lifestyle, irresponsibility? I consider it extremely unlikely that they wouldn't know that a member was dead (seeing as he wouldn't be showing up for recording and all), and even then, so what? If the signatures were genuine, no dead person's name could possibly be on the list. Yet another in the media industry's endless stream of manipulative lies. Naturally, when called out, they will shamelessly deny any previous knowledge. Parasitic lifestyle? We hear every day how the Internet makes the recording industry obsolete. Irresponsible? Like forging dead people's signatures?

Corporations are psychopaths. But they aren't psychopathic because they enjoy being evil - If they don't act like this, the shareholders can sue (If you don't [obviously wrong action], it's bad for profit = lawsuit). If this nonsense is to stop while it's still possible to get corporations back under control, the law needs to change. Seeing as it's 4am, I leave it to the rest of you to propose the changes.

anger

I wonder if the general public will be outraged enough by this to do something about it. Its obvious to everyone here that the labels are evil, but I wonder if the public at large understands it as well, and if not, if obvious lies and manipulation are sufficient to show it to them. Of course, you would think the Sony root kit would have done the same thing, and it doesn't seem to have made a real difference.

Advertising Standard Authority

If this is an Advert in the UK Edition of the FT, then the appropriate action to take would be to complain to the Advertising Standards Authority. ASA rulings are usually considered newsworthy in a minor way, and would raise awareness of the issue.

Re:Advertising Standard Authority

I made a complaint, if some other British people could then it might help them notice, you can complain online. The article was Thursday, 7th December. Here is the online complaint form:

http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/how_to_complain/complain ts_form/ [asa.org.uk]

If anyone knows the page number, or better, even has a copy of the ad then that would be really god.

Welcome to the new world of .....

...Cyber space virtual reality where you never really die and someone else really does own all your base.

Intellectual property rights are man created and man enforced where they can reasonably be enforced.

However, the value of the intellectual property only goes as far as the ability to share it, via licensing or some other method of "regulation" of the value exchange flow.

You can have all the intellectual property in the world but to yourself it is value less, it is only upon sharing it that it becomes valuable or has value.

With this in mind the apex of debate is regarding at what time does the IP rights constraints become to constraining to others on the path to human advancement that it falsely limits human advancement even effecting the author/inventor life and living environment?

Maybe some see creative works of non-invention as something that doesn't apply to this but the fact is that such creative works being constrained of the past would have, for example, nearly eliminated all science fiction of today. Today all science fiction contains enough elements of works previously done that it would be virtuallyt impossible to write a decent story. The same applies to alot of music.

Intellectual property right are intended to benefit the creator of it, but not to give them a permanet monopoly on it.

As a human character, right and duty, we build upon and with the works of those before us. If we did not then we could not evolved our environment, society, technology, medicine, shelter, transportation etc.. We'd still be living in caves and hunting for food.

Now what if technology could reach the rate of advancement that itself would provide solutions fast enough that we could live much longer, healthier, etc. And this would certainly effect any living "creator"

This cannot happen with IP rights constraining such forward movement!

They just signed on the wrong line

It wasn't their copyright term they were trying to extend...

Reg Shoe would be proud.

Go Dead!

I wonder...

...if the dead musicians also signed the petition to decrease their royalties [tuaw.com]?

I like Lebanon's hezbollah petitions better

Dead people do NOT sign these petitions ... but they do have a strong tendency to die AFTER it was asked of them

Copyrights should not be permanently transferrable

One of the biggest problems with the recording industry is that the artists sign over their copyright holdings permanently instead of leasing them. Right now the transfer of copyright is complete and permanent.

The lease should end when the contract does. The artist or artists would then have the option to renew their contract and lease, sign a new contract / release indie, or release it into the public domain.

With a lease, you can be assured that there isn't an abuse of the power that record labels have now. A simple law could make these current types of contracts obsolete and illegal. Artists should also be able to reference this law and get their copyrights returned to the rightful owner.

This kind of thing is being done with the LOTR Trilogy and The Hobbit. The movie rights were leased to Miramax for a short period. If they do not finish the movies within that timeframe, they cannot release them.

Lets face it, record labels themselves are an obsolete business model. There are many ways to do self promotion now and you don't need to include a 3rd party publisher. A simple website, some iTunes tracks and a live tour are you really need to promote yourself. All labels really do is publish little plastic discs. They don't need exclusive rights to your material to do that.

Are we sure it's a problem?

Err, I'm only in my second year of law school, so everyone should take this with a grain of salt. However, if the trustee of his estate is empowered with the right to endorse certain things on his behalf, my half informed judgment is that this isn't a problem. The endorsements you make are probably an asset that can be allocated to trustees upon certain executory conditions, the least problematic of which is endorsing an organization that legally represents your interests as an artist.

Larry Lessig doesn't get it...

... this petition was initiated years ago. It read:

    It may be possible in the future that it will be necessary to extend copyright. If you sign now we will take care to pass over your signature when this condition arises.

Indeed this petition was originally written in ancient egypt about threethousand years ago. And I am the only beneficiary. Take my word for it.

Anonymous Coward

I see dead people

... and they're signing petitions

Who benefits?

Do they really want us to believe that today's musicians will record more music if they get 95 years of copyright? Is there a musician (who doesn't write his own songs -- compositions get life ) for whom the deciding factor on recording a song is the infinitesimal chance that her song will be commercially viable after 50 years?

The risk that a musician is so dispirited by only getting 50 years of copyright on the recordings of her work is wholly theoretical. No one can point to such a musician. That musician, btw, isn't tomorrow's artist -- it's all recording artists since the term of phonogram monopoly was set at 50 years. Every song recorded for for the 20th century was produced with that incentive (or less).

However, there are two very real, non-theoretical groups of musicians for whom the existing term of 50 years is too long:

* Samplers and remixers. This is a non-theoretical, concrete and visible group of working musicians. They are unable to incorporate other works from culture into theirs without paying -- and not just paying, either. It's nearly impossible for an artist outside of the label system to clear samples from the labels' catalogues. That's because the labels give preferential treatement to one another in a mutually assured destruction dynamic (if EMI doesn't license its samples to Sony, then Sony can refuse to license to EMI). The effect of this for samplers and remixers in the UK is that they have to either:

1. Be criminals

2. Not make art

3. Sign up for the deal the labels offer, assign copyright in their works to the labels, and take the crummy "recoup"-based payment scheme the labels offer.

Talk about creating a buyer's market for what musicians have to sell!

* The other group of musicians harmed by the overlong term is those whose work is forgotten -- orphaned by society. In these cases, either the label still holds the copyright but won't reissue the musician's work (Universal's Decca warehouse in London holds the entire, unreleased catalogue of roots music, back to steel cylinders, and Universal hasn't even catalogued that collection, let alone made plans to re-release it); or no one knows who hold the copyright, because the deal was done so long ago.

At a recent Future of Music conference, Alanis Morrisette's attorney said that in his research, over 80% of all music recorded is not in the stream of commerce. In Eldred v Ashcroft, the US Supreme Court fount that *ninety eight percent* of all copyrighted works are "orphans".

For these musicians, alive or dead, there is a fate worse than penury: obscurity. Their works -- the art they cherished and midwifed -- have been eliminated from the historical record. We have piled their recordings up in a huge bonfire and burned them in slow motion.

Finally, there's another non-hypothetical, real, visible group of artists for whom term extension is directly harmful: composers.

People who write songs get a much longer term of copyright than those who perform them. When Elvis goes into the public domain and his records are re-issued, the black songwriters whose work he performed *still* get paid by the reissuers. Right now, these composers are hostage to Elvis's label: if they don't re-release, the composers don't get a cheque. But the elimination of the majors from the equation makes it possible for a much more diverse population of entrepreneurs to arrange for such a re-release.

It's pure sophistry to wring your hands about some theoretical economic situation that will arise for musicians in 2056 when their present-day copyrights expire; that would be fine if there weren't great groups of concrete, present-day musicians crying out to have this happen.

The holders of today's 50 year copyrights fall into three groups:

* Holders of commercially non-viable copyrights (almost all of them fall into this category) -- this group receives direct harm from term extension

* Giant corporations that non-negotiably forced their artists to assign all copyright t

What about the songwriters' children?

When a songwriter dies, his wife, children or other surviving relatives have a legal expectation to continue to earn a little royalty income from his songs. In most cases involving famous songwriters, the songwriter has formed a corporation and/or publishing company with a staff of employees who maintain the catalog of songs and continue to market them. Songwriters write songs with the idea that they will continue to bring in money for their spouses and children for decades after they die.

What's wrong with that?

One problem with the current reality of Internet file sharing is that successful songwriters have far less certainty of being able to provide for their loved ones in the future. I think that's very unfortunate.

Re:What about the songwriters' children?

You were using circular logic. Everything you mentioned -- novel, music, software -- revolves around copyright. What happens if you have a job like plumber, carpenter, electrician, mechanic, accountant, doctor, lawyer, nurse, cop, firefighter, etc.?

The problem isn't with you making money on a creation after you stopped, it is sitting on your ass and making money for almost a CENTURY after you stopped. Or making money after you're dead.

Copyright has ONE purpose, to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. If you are dead, you aren't promoting the progress of science or useful arts -- you're dead.

LIMITED time was meant as a prod, meaning that after a SHORT period whatever you created would belong to everyone and you could then create something new. If you live off your past successes for you entire life, you are not promoting the progress of science and useful arts, thus not deserving of a government enforced monopoly.

Don't like it? Create something new.

As far as passing more than liquid cash assets to your kids, that is a great idea. May I suggest real estate, vehicles, stocks, bonds, investments, boats, airplanes and most importantly, a solid work ethic that doesn't involve the idea of living off the imagination of a long dead relative.

Dead Beneficiaries

For if artists can sign petitions after they've died, then why can't they produce new recordings fifty year ago?

I thought they could. Hasn't 2Pac been producing new songs in the past consistently since his death (or am I wrong about the meaning of "newly discovered archival recordings")? How long has he been dead now? The last time I checked (a few years ago) he had put out and album or double album about every two years since his death. Pretty prolific, huh?

It kind of makes one wonder who copyrights are making money for. Certainly dead artists are not enjoying their profits. Or do spirits really need bribe money like in Chinese ancestral religion [wikipedia.org]?

The undead like to eat brains...

...not use 'em.

Died for tax purposes

Were these musicians hiding out in Millyways perhaps?

Sign ORG's petition in response

The Open Rights Group [openrightsgroup.org] is running a Release The Music [releasethemusic.org] campaign, with a petition against term extension that you can sign [releasethemusic.org]. There's also one asking for the right to privately copy CDs to iPods. [pm.gov.uk]

Are Slashdot readers as good at signing petitions as dead musicians?

I'm not sure why the Slashdot editors trimmed the ORG petition off my original submission - do they prefer whinging to doing something politically influential?

Ask The Live Ones

Has anyone checked with the living musicians whose names appear in the ad to determine if all of them know that they signed it?

IP doesn't exist

I've seen a lot of comments arguing about "intellectual property" and I just want to straighten something out right now: there is no such thing as "intellectual property". Ideas and property are nothing alike; ideas can be copied infinitely at no cost. Property cannot be copied infinitely at no cost. No one can own an idea.

The state (of the people, by the people and for the people) may temporarily grant someone exclusive _rights_ to the copying or use of an idea, but this is nothing like property rights. Property rights are in place because multiple people can't use a piece of property at the same time. Copyrights (and patents) are in place to encourage the advancement of new and useful ideas and art (go ahead, look it up, it's in the constitution).

Don't believe me? Go ask a lawyer about so-called "intellectual property". The first thing she will do is ask you "are you talking about copyrights, patents or trademarks?". You'll notice that none of those has anything to do with property. Don't use the phrase "intellectual property"; it's deceitful language used by manipulative people to try to get you into the frame of mind of treating ideas as property.

Re:First post

And used it in such an effective way, too.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

I hope this is a polemic to show why the view is wrong and I'm just missing it...

Things should pass into the public domain. Everything should which is not based on tangable property. Tangable property should be taxed on death (possibly up to 100%).
If you think about how the world would look if we all had eternal rights to our property there would be about 100 people who would own everything and the rest of humanity would die, although a revolution would probably be inevitable anyway and then maybe some more sensible rules could come in.

It is also not judical theft, it is the state acting in the best interests of the population, in exactly the same way it does with people's other rights from the state of nature. They have a legitimate right to do this.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

I think they should just charge "Property Tax" on "Intellectual Property". Then when you do your taxes, you have a choice as to how much you are going to value your "Property" at. If you value it at $100, then when you sue someone, you can only sue for $100 in damages. If you value it at $300,000,000, then you have to pay taxes on $300,000,000. Of course at any time you should be able to abdicate rights to the "Property", and then you would no longer have to pay taxes on it.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.

Very well put. Here, let me make a copy of that song. There, now it's all mine, if you want a copy, go make your own.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

Except this is 50 years ex post facto. If anyone can copy your table after 50, would that make you go back and uncreate it? I mean, after 50 years, if you haven't turned a profit on your first table, either by selling it or appreciating its exclusivity, you're not going to. I think we can count on two hands the number of songs that are still making money after 50 years. And most of the people who made them are dead. So the question isn't "Do I have enough incentive to create this table?" because removing copyright extension takes no rights from you, it just doesn't give you extra rights. So the argument here is that artists will arise from the dead, build a time machine, and then go back and stop themselves from entering the recording business, because their kids and grandkids are only making thousands instead of tens of thousands.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

We're not talking about stealing the table. We're talking about copying the table. There's a large difference. If someone copies the table, all you lose is the uniqueness of your table. You still have your table.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

You don't have a right to make money. You certainly have a right to try, but if you fail that is your problem - maybe your business plan depended on rights you don't have.

Copyright law is there explicitly because the legal system recognize that there is no such thing as "intellectual property". I.e. copyright law is needed because "intellectual property" isn't property, and as a result, copying an idea or expression of that idea isn't theft.

Yes, I know the RIAA wants you to think it is, but it isn't. Copying without permission is copyright infringement, not theft.

The difference being that copyright in modern legal systems is explicitly there to give a temporary monopoly to a creator of a work to promote the advances of the arts and science by granting a (time) limited set of rights that you as a creator would not otherwise have.

Copyright is in any case a "recent" legal construction - it's original intent was to enrich people friendly to the British Crown by handing out artificial monopolies, and now we see corporations trying to move copyright back to that from it's more recent goal of promoting the arts and sciences.

I'd also like to point out that most great art through history was made without any form of copyright protection at all. Artists still created works, and still made a living, in much the same way as all but a tiny minority of the most successfull make most of their money now: By selling originals to wealthy patrons or by performing.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

However, there are other rights - such a private property - and violation of those rights will, as a consequence, make it impossible to be successful in certain types of business.

And the rights granted under copyright law are not "property". Without the time limited monopoly granted by copyright law as a limitation of free speech you wouldn't have any property-like rights to prevent copying at all.

It is wrong to say the holder "would not otherwise have" this right.

Ethically, it belongs to him - he invested the time and money to make it; it is *his property*.

Ethics is entirely subjective. Using it as an argument as to what belongs to whom only works when you talk to someone who agrees with you about what is ethical or not.

Legally on the other hand, it clearly is NOT property. Historically as well, it has never been considered property by society at large. On the contrary, the history of copyright shows very clearly that it has been assumed by most people that there was no natural property right to prevent copying, and that there were no ethical issues with doing so.

Indeed, patents arose from the same idea - that there is no inherent right to prevent copies, even of a physical object - so in addition to copyright, government also granted a temporary monopoly to give an economic incentive to publicize the internals of machines that would otherwise be hard to copy, so that once the monopoly expired, it would be easier to copy. Hence we have patents.

A similar protection was granted for trademarks. That is perhaps the one case where an ethical consideration comes in. Trademarks have two justifications: 1) That it would be unfair for someone to take advantage of the work someone else has put in to make a brand well known, 2) That it would cause consumer confusion, possibly leading consumers to pick inferior products if people could use others trademarks at will. Even in this case, property rights were only part of the consideration, and the original ethical aspects relates as much to the consumer protection issue as to protecting the trademark holder.

Further, your argument that something is ethically the creator's property just because "he invested the time and money to make it" is quite obviously flawed. No right arises just because one has spent time and money on something: If I spend time and money to make public land look prettier, the land doesn't suddenly become mine, and I get no other special rights to it. In fact, if I spend time and money to do just about anything, it only gives me ownership within the confines of a very restricted set of circumstances:

• If I create something out of material I own, on my own time I own it, and this is recognized by most people both as a natural right, and by most countries as a legal right
• If I create something out of material someone else owns, or on time when I'm paid to be employed by someone else, it doesn't matter if I spent time and (my own) money creating it, the object will in most cases belong to the owner of the material I used or my employer.
• If I create a new form of device or an idea expressable as a device, I may apply for a patent as a temporary monopoly. I don't own the idea, but temporary rights to exploit the idea economically, and property rights to whatever physical devices I create according to the idea.
• If I create a copyrightable work, I don't own the expression of the work, but a set of temporary rights to control the economic exploitation of that work by limiting access to copying it and any physical expressions of the work I create myself

The idea that using your time and money to create something somehow automatically makes it yours certainly has no basis in the legal or ethical frameworks most of us live under and by. It might do in your ethical framework, but don't expect the rest of the world to care.

If anything, contrary to your view, the ethics of restrict

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

How do I recapture the time and money I spent making the table if other people make copies for free?

I cannot.

And since I cannot, I can't make the table in the first place, because I need to make money so I can feed myself and rent my flat and buy clothes.

That, sir, is neither my nor society at large's fucking problem. How do you get paid for something that seems inherently unprofitable? Well, either you find a way to make money off it, or you do something lese for money. The world does not automatically owe you something just because you worked hard at some arbitrary task.

Now, as it happens, we as a society decided a long time ago that all this writing, music, and such are a great boon for the cultural commons. In order to encourage the expansion of our common culture, we decided to add a little incentive to the process. We decided to allow the creator, for a limited time, to abridge the rights of others to freely share via copying the work, thereby giving him the means to make a little cash off the monopoly. This scheme has been twisted by publishers over the years via legislation and prpaganda into a de jure "ownership" of the work, and fools like you have bought into it, actually believing that artifacts of our common culture (music, literature, etc) can somehow belong to anyone.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.

You always can do with your ideas whatever you want: you can keep them in your head, you can publish them, you can tell your kids about them.

You want something completely different: you want the power of the state to create a market place for you where there ordinarily wouldn't be one. There is nothing "ethical" about that; it's an artificial construct and a compromise between the rights of the people (which copyright infringes on) and the desire to encourage creation of new, useful content.

The ironic thing about whiners like you is that if your rule were implemented, you wouldn't be able to create anything at all since inventors of basic ideas and creators of basic content are using license enforcement to restrict others from building new stuff. Expiration of copyright is fundamentally necessary for intellectual property to work--if stuff didn't fall into the public domain, others couldn't derive benefits from ideas that build on the old ideas.

Or, to put it bluntly: your ethics are screwed up, and so are your economics.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

If copyrights don't expire, you probably couldn't even make a table - there'd be copyrights on screws, on table legs and anything else you may want to make. For copyright to work for the next generation, it's important that the copyright of this generation expire. By endlessly extending copyright, you're doing a great disservice to future generations.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

You confuse copyright with ownership. Not a surprise that muddling these terms is exactly what the "intellectual property" mafia has been doing for yours.

The painting is yours as property and will belong to you forever, your heirs will inherit it, etc.

The copyright enters the public domain, i.e. after n years someone else can take a photo of your painting and publish it in a book without paying you for doing so. Someone else can sing your song without paying you for it.

The ethical rule fails here because copyright is not a limit on what people can do with your property, but what they can make with their own hands and work.

Here's some resources.

You're seriously asking me what harm an infinite-length copyright term could do? That's a remarkably low bar to set. We'll examine the effects of automatically-renewed copyright terms of long, but not infinite, length here in the United States.

(Bear in mind that to seriously argue for infinite terms, you'd have to show harm to the culture that wouldn't occur if terms were only five hundred years long, for instance. And "it enriches their descendants" doesn't count; we have copyright to promote science and the useful arts. Congress can hand me a stack of Benjies for no particular reason, and that'd be "good" for me, but that doesn't make it good public policy, and it absolutely doesn't promote science and the useful arts.)

If you'd like an example of how current culture always makes use of the past, and how that past has been taken out of the hands of creators, there's an excellent presentation by Lawrence Lessig [randomfoo.net].

If you'd like numbers, see Public Knowledge's statistics [blogspot.com] that of the 3 million registered copyrights from 1923 to 1943, only 2% of them were commercially used in 1998. I think tossing 98% of our culture from that period down the memory hole is a terrible thing to do. (The Lessig presentation has a bit about the role of a noncommercial life for many works--most of the books on Project Gutenberg aren't sold any more, but that doesn't mean they're not useful. Better to have them there than nowhere at all.)

If you'd like anecdotes, you can start with Save The Music [copyright.gov]'s overview, then read anecdotes from researchers who had to change or abandon projects because there was no way to clear rights for orphan works [copyright.gov], archivists and documentarians [copyright.gov] who can't use materials from companies that went out of business many years ago [copyright.gov], or old folks who can't get their wedding photographs repaired if their kid tears them [copyright.gov], or the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America--hardly a bunch of Napster-licking college students--collecting anecdotes where the early pulp heritage of SF can't be reproduced or even preserved because early magazines folded, and no one knows who owns the copyright. [copyright.gov]

An Orphan Works system--or requiring copyright registration again--would address most of these concerns. But ironclad copyright of a century or more, let alone eternal copyright, is destructive madness which serves to enrich a few corporations at the expense of our culture at large, by locking up (until they turn to dust--essentially throwing away) any works which aren't commercially exploited any longer.

So, yeah, there's my evidence; the losses are far from being simply theoretical. Your house analogy is ridiculous for reasons pointed out elsewhere in this thread; no one short of Jack Valenti thinks that intellectual property should be administered the same way as physical property. You can read some of the Founders' thoughts on that. [digital-law-online.info] (As I keep saying, copyright is for the benefit of the culture at large; it rewards creators as an incentive to this end. It is, for this reason, a convenient abstraction, similar to physical property in name only.)

(Also, your distinction between "artistic" and "non-artistic" isn't the right one; you're thinking of creative and non-creative works. See Feist v. Rural [wikipedia.org]; it's not your efforts that are copyrighted, but your creativity, once fixed in a tan

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

"if you make something, it belongs to you"

Copyright, however, isnt about the possession of the object, it's the right to prevent anyone else from possessing a copy of that object.

If you're a carpenter and make a great chair it doesnt pass into the public domain, but you cannot prevent your neighbour from making a chair just like it, nor do you have the right to prevent anyone who purchases the chair to pay another carpenter to copy it.

"It's basically judicial theft."

Except it's the other way around. Preventing the neighbour or customer from making a chair just like the original means you're depriving them of the right to do what they wish with their property.

The value of copyright does not come out of nowhere; it derives its value by depriving others of value and rights. From an ethical point of view it's just the same as other taxation methods; you're depriving one group of people to give to another. Wether that's good or bad is arguable, and mostly a question of public utility.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.

This is the case now. No one is going to take away that picture/piece of software/song, ie the thing you actually created. You'll still own that and be able to do what you want with it.

The only thing that'll you lose is the ability to stop other from making copies.

As to whether that's a good thing, consider the fact that if copyright had always been indefinite then most of the literature, software, music around now wouldn't exist.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

The object doesn't, the copyright does.

Copyright is on the non-physical aspect _because_ it is non-physical. It's an added extra that rewards craftsmen who do not work with stuff you can kick.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

It's not theft. It's your part of the bargain.

Every act of creation of non-material goods such as stories, paintings, programs and songs is thought to be based on works of others. You did not create it yourself, you learned from others. Society grants you the right to get money for it, for the most part of your live, but not longer. In the end, the creation flows into the public domain because, into the culture it came from. This is thought to help others create more and new things.

Don't confuse "IP" (i hate that therm) with physical property. It is not the same. Sure, you can give it to your kids. And you can give the money you earned with it to your kids. But why the hell would it make sense to provide a free income for your kids for the rest of their lives because you wrote a nice song once?

And furthermore, in reality, it is not the children (o think of them, nice try that argument of yours) who in most cases get the money. It is the investors in 5 or 6 record companies. What is ethical about paying them money for 95 years?

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

Because granting someone a copyright is a violation of everyone else's right to free speech. Nations that value both kinds of rights often try to find a balance.

Re:First post

With a UID that low, GP is likely dead.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

i'm not up on right wing american talk radio slang, so forgive me but, what is 'judical theft'? Does it mean that it is well reasoned and fair theft that is in the best interest of society?

The problem with owning a song or book is that it fails to recognize the fact that the artist did not create something ex nihilo. Each artist is bequethed a heritage of material and inspiration from those who have come before, kinda like scientists. They then make their contributions and it is passed onto the next generation. For example, Shakespeare took his story ideas from other authors and many subsequent authors have used him for source material.

IMo, you cant own information anymore then you can own your children. And trying to circumvent this self-evident truism only hinders growth, be it spiritual, economic, or scientific.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

Oh. It does. Erm, why?

For the good of society.

It's basically judicial theft.

No it's not, since it doesn't deprive you of anything. The only judicial theft going on is the theft of my right to do what I want with property I own, including making a copy of it.

Re:First post

He probably got it off Ebay.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

I could be wrong, but I think you've conflated property rights with the ethical imperative to help others.

If I make a song, and I decide to keep it in the family, I've not caused harm to others - either by my action or by my inaction.

If I invest a cure for a terrible disease and I keep it in the family, I've caused others harm by my inaction - by not offering them the cure when I could have done so.

I would agree that for some knowledge, there is an ethical imperative to share that knowledge, and I think this is the case when harm is prevented by sharing. However, it does not count as "harm" to prevent someone from listening to a song, seeing a film or having a copy of the latest Oracle database.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

"It's basically judicial theft.

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives."

Uh, no. If you make something, it belongs to you, yes, and you can do what you want with it. But if you make a car, and it belongs to you, obviously if someone steals it you don't have it anymore, and you can't use it or pass it on to your kids. If, however, you write a poem, novel, or a piece of sheet music, you can still hang on to it forever, and it is still yours, and you can pass it on to your children, but once you make zillions of copies and sell them (i.e. publish it), what then? What's to prevent someone from copying it themselves? In the absence of copyright law, nothing. You can appeal to people's sense of ethics, but history shows that often doesn't work, and there is a grey line regarding what constitutes copying a work versus merely being inspired by it. Anyway, people haven't stolen your copy from you if they make their own copy, either from the paper expression of it or by listening to you reciting the material or playing it, and writing down their own copy from what they heard. They are NOT stealing from you, they are duplicating what you made. It would be like seeing your car, and then manufacturing their own, identical version. They have not stolen your car.

Now, you can call it "judicial theft" that under copyright law your work will eventually pass into the public domain, but in actuality it is a simple bargain. A contract of a sort. You'd like legal protection against people attempting to make copies of your work? That's fine. In the interests of encouraging you to publish your work, you can get a period where you, exclusively, can make and optionally sell copies of your work. The public (via law) is giving you that right and will enforce its protection using the judiciary and police. In exchange, after a reasonable period of time (to be defined), the same law says that you must turn the work over to the public domain -- i.e. the exclusive period has limited duration. Copyright is not "judicial theft", it is this bargain. You get something (exclusive copy rights), the public gets something (the eventual end of those rights).

Don't like it? It's simple. Keep the work to yourself (i.e. don't publish it), and it will forever remain under your complete control. Put your original in the attic, and your kids can keep it and admire it forever.

To put it simply: if you don't like the ethics of copyright law, then don't enter into the bargain by publishing your work.

And if you want to enter into the world where, due to application of strict ethics, people can't use any of each other's good ideas to develop their own, because it's "wrong", well, that would be a pretty stifling environment in which to try to operate.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.

Alright, but only on one condition. We get to strike all of the laws that give you a monopoly on anything non-physical you produce. You can have all the laws you want protecting your physical property (which includes CDs and paintings) but no longer will you be able to sue people for copyright infringement.

If you're willing to agree to that, I'm willing to abolish the public domain.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

Though in art, the original nearly always has considerably more value than copies or reproductions (and often only becomes valuable after the artist's death). Music is a little different, often the copies (ie arrangements) become well known and therefore more valuable. Take for example Pictures from an Exhibition by Mussorgsky. Almost everyone knows it as an orchestral piece, as orchestrated by Ravel, many do not even know that in its original form it is for piano. In music, 'borrowing' themes from other composers, and adapting them, is very common and is an important part of how music evolves.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

So-- you're up for paying royalties for the use of Aristotle's works? Or Shakespeare's plays? Should we be paying to take photos of the Sistine Chapel? How about churches coughing up for the use of the King James bible? Maybe we should go back and find all of Edgar Allen Poe's relatives, start paying them royalties to offset the effects of "judicial theft" over the years (especially those football-playing bastards in Baltimore!).

We may not be able to track down the heirs of Aristotle, but what about Mark Twain? How about Thomas Jefferson?

The idea of perpetual copyright seems wonderfully logical when you apply the (incredibly recent and very inappropriate) label of "intellectual property" to them. But when you start looking at older works, particularly those of nearly immeasurable cultural value, it becomes apparent that, at some point in time, copyright protection is neither reasonable nor appropriate.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

I find it depressing that /. readership mods views they disagree with as flamebait and troll.

It should be clear from the post that I'm making a serious point, which means I'm not trolling or angling for a fight.

When debate - which inherently means the positing of disagreeing views - is modded as flamebait, you have ossified.

You're an Economist?

Not everything is property. Consider air. Consider untreated sea water. Why? Partly because some of these are difficult to enforce, but also partly because property requires society to enforce it.

Society will only enforce something if it is in their interests to do so. Certainly rival goods such as a physical painting, a program that hasn't been distributed, or a physical copy of an artist's work are enforced as property because protecting rival goods is good for society, as well as the individual.

But with non-rival goods it's not the same. Furthermore, it's a muddy area whether it is even theft when the act of copying leaves the original. More prosaically, this "theft" can create new demand [slashdot.org]. Charging for pirated goods is theft in my opinion since this directs funds that are intended for the copyright holder towards the counterfeiter, but it is the misrepresentation that makes it theft: you are buying a forgery. Accordingly, I have always argued that punishment should be proportional to money made, rather than some projected level of damages, that according to research simply doesn't exist.

Property is a positive right; a priori, you only own yourself; less if you are a theist. The rest you have as a result of being willing to defend your property, and because society sees the common interest in preserving incentives so as to allow long-term freedom. The ability to plan, for example. The inability to create derived works is a restraint of freedom, so the reason why property is protected begins to fail with time, and more so as time moves on. Eventually, the value to culture of having a work freely available far outweighs the value of the incentive, so society stops enforcing the right.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

The ethical rule is this; if you make something, it belongs to you, and you can do what you want with it - and that includes handing it down to your kids to help them in their lives.

If you make something physical, that object belongs to you. You paid for the materials, you did the work. If you show it to someone, and they like it, they might decide to build one themselves. The one they build does not belong to you, it belongs to them.

Intellectual property is very different from real property. Here's another example:

Let's say you tell someone that you have this ESP-like feeling that the numbers 17 35 8 7 22 and 19 are going to be this week's lotto numbers. You go ahead and play those numbers, and guess what...the person you told them to figures they might play them as well. You both win. Now the jackpot is divided between the two of you. Do you think you should have the right to sue them because it was your idea to play those numbers? If you didn't want them to play those numbers, why did you tell it to them?

Music is pretty much the same way. If you don't want to share it with the world at large, you can write it and keep it a secret. Record it, play it to yourself when no one else is at home. No one is going to "steal it" from you. However, you want other people to listen don't you? You want to make money off of it? Well, once they listen, it becomes part of their culture. They might get it stuck in their heads. They might be whistling it while they work. They might like to sing along with it when they hear it on the radio. They'll reference the lyrics when they think they would bring something to the conversation. The music is now theirs. It's part of them. By letting them hear it, you gave it to them.

Any rights you have to prevent them from singing it in public (like Happy Birthday in restaurants), or to otherwise copy it, is purely artificial. Nothing is being taken from you. You still have the guitar you used to compose the music (unless you sold it), you still have the original recordings (unless you threw them away), you can still play them yourself. The only reason people can copy your song is because you let them have it in the first place. So choose. Keep your song secret and profit from it, or give it to the community.

You want both? Well, if you're a good musician, society wants to encourage you to write more songs. So we'll give you the artificial right to control what is now our song for a set number of years. They should be small enough that you can't really live off of that one song for the rest of your life. After all, that defeats the purpose of encouraging you to write more songs, doesn't it?

Do you want to profit from the song after the copyright has expired? Feel free. Society has this strange "celebrity complex." If you perform the song in public, the people who like the song will pay to be near you, to see you there, next to them, singing it live. Society has taken nothing from you. You definitely gave something to society. Stop trying to steal it back from us, while at the same time keeping our money.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

The problem is that the song belongs to the public.
Copyright is basically a trade whereby a person doesn't keep their story/song/etc locked up in their head, and instead releases it to the public. In return, the artist is allowed a monopoly over the reproduction of said story/song/etc for a limited period.
At best, the artists in question are attempting a breach of contract by taking the monopoly part of the trade, and then failing to accept the release of the art into the public domain. It's generally accecpt that it's unacceptable to steal in such a way, so why should we let these artists get away with such theft?

Advice to moderators

Please try not to mod down the parent post just because you disagree with it (as I do). Of course, if you have other reasons to mod it down, go for it.

Re:Dead artists...

just look at tupac! he's been releasing albums and he's been dead for 10 years. I wonder what his take is on this.

No, it shouldn't, and here's why.

Well, yes. Yes, copyright does revert to the public domain after a period of time. Says so in the Constitution, and with good reason. If culture can't build on what came before, it's going to be a mightily controlled, impoverished culture. (Lawrence Lessig explains here. [randomfoo.net])

You're equating intellectual property with actual property, which is a common but unfortunate mistake, encouraged by the dishonest lobbyists we're talking about. See, there's nothing inherently property-ish about knowledge. If I teach you a song, I don't stop knowing it. If I give you my fire, I can still keep my own. Intellectual property is a virtual sort of property, invented specifically to encourage people to create by giving them a government-created monopoly for a limited period of time. There is no natural right to intellectual property; the government is not taking anything away. It is giving the artist a limited-time monopoly, not for the benefit of the artist, but for the benefit of the culture at large. (Really, it's in the Constitution.)

In fact, it's much like patents, which don't last nearly as long as copyrights. In exchange for publicizing the details of your invention, you get a short-term, government-sponsored monopoly on it. Are you saying that the light bulb, the bra, the syringe, the hammer, the bikini, the internal combustion engine, long underwear and a method of making potash [uspto.gov] would not be part of common cultural knowledge, and we should have to pay the descendants of the inventors who would have every right to not let us manufacture light bulbs, bras, etc.? What, exactly, is the benefit of having our culture's know-how locked up and controlled in that manner?

Depends on where we want to go as a Society

I happen to believe that we need to find a balance between the incentives offered to artists and our progression as a society. The only way we move forward is by making advances each generation, this applies not only to technological advances but to cultural advances too. Our understanding of ourselves through our culture changes and is built on the advances made by those before us. If those advances are prevented from entering our common "tree of knowledge," it makes our progression as a species that much harder. As far as providing incentives to artists, I feel that there needs to be a time frame within which the artist or the assigns can attempt to make money with a work, but there's no right to make money and if it hasn't happened for a while, then it probably won't happen. My proposals are thus: 1. All works that are copyrighted must be registered -- no automatic copyright. There should be some nominal registration fee, such as $1. This allows people who want to use a work to find the creator or assign of that work. (It helps prevent the argument that if one can't find out who owns a work, then one can use it for free since they're not out anything because that person wouldn't know who to give the money to anyway). 2. Each year the re-registration fee goes up. I think the cost should be $2^(n-1) where n is the year of the registration starting at year 1. So, at the 14 years that the constitution discusses, the cost would be $8,192 which would be a pretty good cutoff for all but corporations. However, even corporate icons such as Mickey Mouse would be released in a generational time frame (at year 31, the cost is over a billion). This isn't that unfair considering Steamboat Willy ripped off Steamboat Bill.

Re:Copyright should permanently belong to the auth

If I purchase a book, the book becomes my property. Yet by law, I am not allowed to make a copy of said book until the copyright expires on it. In fact, copyright restricts private property rights by restricting what you can do with your own property.

Re:John Lennon...

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

I hate to break it to Johnny boy, but copyright is a possession!

Physical versus digital

Well, with a painting, the original - if famous enough - will not only still be worth money after your death, but will probably increase in value and accrue additional value over time. See for example the Mona Lisa, copies exist in plenty, but the original is still worth the big bucks. What if everyone who published an article about it or an encyclopedia reference etc etc had to pay DaVinci's great great great great great grandchildren. How is that useful to society?

Code doesn't work quite so well, but then again little is overly useful after a decade or two has passed. An alghorithm might be, but as a programmer myself I hardly expect that if I came up with something unique and with strong future use, that my great-grandkids would be able to leech on it for perpetuity.

As for music... well digital copies more or less should apply just as the do to the Mona Lisa, but if the artists keep their orginals I'd quite imagine those would be worth a lot of value over time. I know many who would pay a pretty penny for some of the original Pink Floyd vinyl etc