Category: Copyright

Copyright extension is anti-music

September 12th, 2011 · · Copyright One comment

Regulators at the European level have voted to extend the copyright in sound recordings for a further 20 years. In so doing, they have more or less condemned the vast majority of music to the dustbins of history.

This Wired UK article explains:

But a government-backed, independent review of copyright doesn’t agree. A 2006 Gowers Review of Intellectual Property said, “The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years”

In its conclusion, the review says, “it is our view that a term extension will likely result in a net loss to UK society as a whole”, arguing that while retrospective extensions would line the pockets of the largest record producers, money to individual performers would be minimal and the cost to the consumer would be massive.

Continue reading »

Copyright law needs a digital-age upgrade

September 26th, 2010 · · Copyright, Orphan Works No comments

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Did you ever imagine you could be held liable for copyright infringement for storing your music collection on your hard drive, downloading photos from the Internet or forwarding news articles to your friends?

If you did not get the copyright owner’s permission for these actions, you could be violating the law. It sounds absurd, but copyright owners have the right to control reproductions of their works and claim statutory damages even when a use does not harm the market for their works.

Nice to see a mention of libraries and orphan works in there…

The optimal term for copyright: 15 years?

September 17th, 2010 · · Copyright No comments - Tags: , ,

studio shelves and paper cutter

There’s an article in Techdirt today that discusses just how many books would be available in the public domain if copyright had stayed at its original length. It also references a research article that concludes that the optimal term for copyright is 15 years [PDF link].

I’ve argued in the past in favour of a five-year copyright term, but with indefinite renewal for works that are commercially active, and a ‘use it or lose it’ clause to encourage both a more active commercial exploitation and distribution of a wider array of works and a more vibrant and healthy public domain.

This is not, of course, a widely held ideal of how copyright terms should work and some people on both sides of the debate have difficulty with it. For some, five years is way too short. For others, indefinite renewal is far too long.

Continue reading »

Great article in the NYT: Lewis Hyde & copyright

September 13th, 2010 · · Copyright No comments - Tags: , ,

What Is Art For? – Lewis Hyde – Profile (from NYTimes.com):

Excerpt: For the Copy Left, as for Hyde, the last 20 years have witnessed a corporate “land grab” of information — often in the guise of protecting the work of individual artists — that has put a stranglehold on creativity, in increasingly bizarre ways. Over dinner not long ago, he told me about the legal fate of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Dickinson died in 1886, but it was not until 1955 that an “official” volume of her collected works was published, by Harvard University Press. The length of copyright terms has expanded substantially in the last century, and Harvard holds the exclusive right to Dickinson’s poems until 2050 — more than 160 years after they were first written. When the poet Robert Pinsky asked Harvard for permission to include a Dickinson poem in an article that he was writing for Slate about poetic insults, it refused, even for a fee. “Their feeling was that once the poem was online, they’d lose control of it,” Hyde told me.

Read the full article here.