
Congress wants to extend the copyright on some sound recordings to 144 years - stablemap
https://boingboing.net/2018/05/18/orrin-fucking-hatch.html
======
JackCh
> _Music Modernization Act_

I don't know if/how it could legally be done, but I'd love to see "cute" names
for laws barred from use in Congress. Refer to them all by number not brand
names dreamed up by marketing professionals to make the proposed law seem
unassailable ( _" Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate
Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act"_ aka USA PATRIOT Act).

~~~
jjoonathan
How about having a mechanism to allow the opposition to vote on a secondary
name which will be included alongside the primary name in official
correspondence?

Yes, it will degrade into "Bill to Save America / Bill to Destroy America"
most of the time, but that's the point: it makes the absurdity easy to spot
and difficult to ignore.

~~~
airstrike
This is actually an amazing idea.

------
test6554
Here's the EFF link to contact your senator:

[https://act.eff.org/action/stop-another-expansion-of-
copyrig...](https://act.eff.org/action/stop-another-expansion-of-copyright-
tell-the-senate-to-vote-no-on-s-2823)

If you do so, be brief, polite, and state your position, for or against as
well as the strength of your position (strongly against, etc.). The staffer
will simply aggregate everyone's for/against positions. Verbal abuse or extra
emotion is not helpful.

~~~
colordrops
I agree that it's not helpful. I do think the verbal abuse and anger comes
from the helplessness people feel since they know that these senators are
greedy sociopaths that already know bills like this are bad and won't take
your voice into consideration.

~~~
hak8or
And yet people vote them in.

~~~
kei929
Emotional capture is a thing

Basically a nation state forces people to adopt Stockholm syndrome under the
guise of pragmatic acquiescence

------
rhino369
Extending copyright long after the life of an artist is bad economics. Because
of the value of future money any revenue from future sales 30+ is essentially
worthless now. So it doesn’t induce people to create more works of art and
entertainment.

~~~
dschuler
Is that if the price is constant over that time? Couldn't you just price the
product to reflect roughly constant value, giving you linear return over time?

~~~
dsr_
Only if demand is relatively constant.

Nothing is less constant than the demand for entertainment, and that's
reflected in current pricing.

A new blockbuster movie costs $15 in 3D, $12 in 2D.

A month later it costs $6 at the second-run theater.

Three months later it costs $20 on Blu-Ray for as many times as you want to
watch it.

A year later it's included in your HBO subscription.

A year after that you can buy the disc for $10.

Ten years later you can buy the whole series for $30.

Forty years later it gets shown as 3AM filler on a cable network you don't pay
for separately.

144 years later there are film scholars who have heard of it.

~~~
francisofascii
There are notable exceptions. The Bambi DVD, which was created in 1942, is
listed on Amazon for $28. In 20 years, it will be $50.

~~~
dsr_
Well... the Bambi film came out in 1942. You can buy the Signature Edition
DVD+BR for $30, but you can also buy a 2 disc special edition for $7.49, the
Anniversary Edition for $15.96, and a Blu-Ray for $14.27. We haven't reached
the used market, where eBay can get you a copy for $5, most of which will go
to shipping it to you.

~~~
EvanAnderson
There won't be a "used market" for media in the future, because media won't be
delivered on physical substrate. The publishing interests have been working to
eliminate it for years. Between DRM and streaming I think they'll manage to
kill used markets.

------
Yetanfou
The main motivation for extending copyright 'till the cows come home is most
likely to keep material from becoming public domain and thereby from making
sure it doesn't compete with the latest thrash the industry is producing. If
their latest auto-tuned plastic one-hit wonder had to compete against a wealth
of free-as-in-beer music the risk would be for the latter to become popular
among the cool kids. No free music means no risk of that happening.

~~~
eilyra
That makes me wonder, is there already something akin to Project Gutenberg but
for music rather than books? Would be interesting to browse.

~~~
mikekchar
I ran into this the other day:
[http://radio.publicdomainproject.org/](http://radio.publicdomainproject.org/)

------
hristov
They say that in ancient roman times during a triumph there would be a slave
that follows the triumphant general whispering to him "remember you are
mortal".

They should have a congressional page follow Orin Hatch whispering in his ear
"remember you are not a singer songwriter, your songs all suck, and nobody
would ever listen to them if you were not a senator."

~~~
pjc50
I very much doubt it's anything to do with musical aspirations and more to do
with campaign contributions.

------
kwhitefoot
It's there any point in fighting this sort of thing anymore? Shouldn't 'we'
just make sure digital copies are available somewhere; like scihub does for
scientific papers? It seems to be impossible to reason with the politicians
everywhre on this subject, not just in the US, so perhaps direct action is all
that is left.

------
AnimalMuppet
I'm completely unsurprised that it's Hatch. At least he's gone at the end of
the year.

But if I understand the article, the current state of play is that Hatch
introduced this into a bill that had already passed the House. If the Senate
passes this, then it's different from the bill that passed the House, so it
goes to a reconciliation committee. If the copyright extension survives that,
then the modified bill has to pass both the House and the Senate.

So, yes, this is bad, and we need to work against it. But we still have
several chances to block it.

------
d--b
At some point, people need to realize it's not the copyright system that's
rotten, it's the incentivization of congressmen...

~~~
contravariant
There's no reason it has to be one or the other.

~~~
akvadrako
But one is the cause of the other.

------
saosebastiao
What's crazy to me is that this legislation really only needs one person to
get it there, because Congress is nothing more than a club of mutual
backscratchers. Why focus on real issues when you can spend all your your time
acquiring IOUs that will eventually pay off big?

~~~
SomewhatLikely
And for long term issues like this you can wait around years until you have a
favorable Congress to pass these kinds of legislation.

------
mnm1
As if the music industry, an industry I dearly love, isn't shit already, now
congress wants to make it even worse. I don't see how they justify the current
streaming deals or how they are even legal. They certainly aren't fair. It
seems that congress is solely concerned with the profits of distributors and
couldn't give a rat's ass about the livelihood of all the musicians who create
this music. Extending copyright is just another example of how wrong congress
is on this issue. At this point, I don't even know what to say. Musicians had
a chance to ditch the so-called record labels, yet they seemingly decided to
trade them in for even shittier deals with the likes of Spotify and Pandora.
And somehow it got codified into law. It's amazing to me that there are still
musicians producing music for a living. I do not see this profession lasting
much longer as a viable profession, except for the most popular, biggest
artists. In other words, these idiotic copyright laws that are supposed to
incentivize creation have essentially ended the aspirations of most
professional musicians. Ironic that it was claimed that piracy would do this.
From a musician's standpoint, however, what is the difference between piracy
and Spotify when both generate a revenue stream asymptotical to zero?

------
peterwwillis
Called it!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16966918](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16966918)

~~~
unexistance
and apparently highly unlikely :D

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-
says-i...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-its-not-
planning-another-copyright-extension-push/)

------
icebraining
Counterpoint: _No, the CLASSICS Act is not a “term extension”_

[http://www.copyhype.com/2018/05/no-the-classics-act-is-
not-a...](http://www.copyhype.com/2018/05/no-the-classics-act-is-not-a-term-
extension/)

I'm hardly a fan of copyright, but the arguments that this is not actually an
extension seem sound.

~~~
ScottBurson
Hmm. The argument seems to be that pre-1972 sound recordings (only recordings,
not compositions) enjoyed protection under a patchwork of state laws and
aspects of common law, protection that was arguably unlimited. (It's not clear
to me whether these are technically considered copyright protections; I guess
not.) Therefore, protecting artists' right to receive royalties from
streaming, as long as the performance is still under copyright, isn't
technically an extension; in fact the 2067 cutoff could be considered a new
limitation.

So I guess my take on this is that I still feel that copyright terms (95 years
or longer, depending on certain circumstances [0]) are too long, and I can see
that this bill might technically not be making the problem worse.

[0]
[https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf](https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf)

------
trumped
Which recording was this bill written for?

~~~
sandworm101
Elvis. Then the early beatles stuff. In the next couple decades some actual
pop songs are ready to hit public domain.

~~~
xamuel
Wait, isn't it life plus 70 years? If so, the only Beatles music that would be
public domain any time soon would be if there were songs by Stuart
Sutcliffe...

~~~
sandworm101
Now, but until a few years ago some countries (Canada) only gave 50 years from
publication. So the law was changed. Google the "mickey mouse copyright graph"
to see what I mean. The US has repeatedly extended its copyright terms
coincidentally in time to protect Disney assets.

------
RobertoG
>>"The beneficiaries of this monopoly need do nothing to get the benefit of
this gift."

That's unfair. There is nothing for free, specially in politics. It's more
probable that, the work, has been already done and now they are receiving the
prize for their lobbying efforts.

------
btown
The linked Lawrence Lessig op-ed [0] makes reference to a Supreme Court case
he argued, where the 70-year version of this law was upheld. Luckily, unlike
the sound recordings in question, Supreme Court oral arguments are available
to posterity unencumbered, under a legal framework that encourages small,
innovative providers like oyez.org to deliver them to the public. Here's the
argument in question:

[https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-618](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2002/01-618)

It's fascinating to hear these oral arguments, because you have some of the
smartest legal minds in the world making references on the fly to obscure two-
hundred-year-old case law, stringing things together in logical ways in much
the same way that the most exciting engineering conversations in _our_ line of
work involve rapid conversations at a whiteboard, where deep technical
knowledge and logic come together to create frameworks and business models
that have never existed before.

But while lawyers and justices are engineers in one way, building case-law
"frameworks" to improve the citizenry's experience based on a wide range of
constitutional knowledge and common sense... lawmakers are engineers in
another way, "hacking" those frameworks to see what they can get away with.
Sometimes "hacking" is good, but it's entirely dependent on the moral compass
of the hacker.

In this specific case, the Supreme Court had argued on the basis of a balance
of harm to different types of "progress" as laid out in the Constitution: is
it more likely that progress will be economically incentivized if copyright
terms are extended retroactively, or if copyright terms are not extended
retroactively? At the time, a lot of this was tied up in ensuring consistency
with international law. But that's not the case under the 144-year CLASSICS
Act now being considered - as Lessig describes in the op-ed, "no other
jurisdiction creates a similar right anywhere."

So to me, the balance if the Supreme Court were to review this case would be
to consider a streaming music provider's incentives. Do more people hear and
become inspired by 1930's public-domain jazz music if:

(a) it's all public domain, anyone can start a startup streaming it; or

(b) it's protected, and large streaming companies like Spotify can invest more
money into the propagation of the work because they have exclusive rights to a
subset of it, even if the subset that is now "orphaned" is not accessible as
it would be in (a)?

It's a complicated question, and as a technologist I would lean towards (a) if
harmony with international law is no longer a consideration. But, as I
mentioned, legislators are "hackers," and with the Supreme Court unable (by
design) to proactively limit their ability to build on the existing precedent
that extensions are possible... it all comes down to their moral compass and
alignment with their economic incentives.

...and per [1], Orrin Hatch has received $664k over his career from the
"TV/Movies/Music" industry.

(IANAL but things like this make me want to be one.)

[0] [https://www.wired.com/story/congress-latest-move-to-
extend-c...](https://www.wired.com/story/congress-latest-move-to-extend-
copyright-protection-is-misguided/)

[1] [https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-
congress/industries?c...](https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-
congress/industries?cid=N00009869&cycle=CAREER)

~~~
ScottBurson
Here's what the Constitution says: Article I Section 8. Clause 8 – Patent and
Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “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.”

So, what is a "limited" time? The current trend seems to be toward considering
any mathematically finite number of years to be "limited". A hundred, a
thousand, a million, a billion, a googol (10 ^ 100), a googolplex (10 ^ 10 ^
100) — these are all finite numbers.

I would argue that the Constitution was written by and for human beings, and
therefore "limited" means "limited on a human timescale", and therefore the
upper limit should be about half a mean human lifetime. Certainly, if a
typical human can be born after a copyright is established, and live their
life and die before it terminates, in their experience that's effectively an
unlimited duration.

~~~
kevin_b_er
Quoting corrupt congresswoman Mary Bono: "Actually, Sonny wanted the term of
copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a
change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to
strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know,
there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day.
Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress."

They want copyright forever. They have the _entitlement_ to think it should be
forever.

Since those in power no longer respect it being for a limited time, I put
forth the "exclusive rights" should not be respected either. I do not consider
or respect any copyrights held by Mary Bono as a result.

------
csense
I'm sure this is bill sponsored by some of the finest Congressmen money can
buy.

------
Clubber
It's funny that the senator's party's platform is based around little to no
government regulation and healthy capitalistic competition. Here he is
granting an artificial monopoly for 7 generations. I'll bet his hands were
well greased.

Gotta love corrupt America.

~~~
rayiner
Copyright is about the least artificial monopoly that exists. An artificial
monopoly is the government sending men with guns to keep bigger stronger men
than me off my land. It's a chunk of dirt that existed millions of years
before I was born and will continue to exist millions of years after I'm dead,
but the government allows me to call it "mine." That's as artificial as it
gets, but we call it "natural rights."

A monopoly on creative works--something that didn't exist before the person
who created it--is far less artificial. (And granting a monopoly on something
that's non-rival, so everyone can have as much of it as they want so long as
they're willing to create their own, seems far better than granting one on a
scarce natural resource.)

~~~
barrkel
I don't accept that for a moment. Monopoly over land predates humans, as any
observation of territorial creatures will let you know.

~~~
rayiner
Territorial creatures have possession, not property, which is completely
different. Bashing someone's head in and taking their property is natural
right. Having the State send men with guns in response to that action is a
highly artificial deprivation of that natural right.

~~~
mijamo
I think you should read about natural rights. The traditional natural righta
are life, liberty, and property, which is the opposite of what you describe.
And natural rights only exist in an organized society, they are just the
limits of what a human should give in its social contract with the society.

~~~
icebraining
I'm pretty sure rayiner knows what the concept is, he's criticizing it for
misusing the term "natural" and he's replacing it for something that is
actually _natural_.

Besides, current property is quite far from the Lockean concept of mixing your
own labor and only taking it when "there is enough, and as good, left in
common for others", which the original "natural right of property".

------
tgamba
So glad I live in Canada. American corporatist evil seems boundless.

~~~
colechristensen
Canada signed the TPP which makes copyright 70 years after the death of the
creator.

Not exactly paradise.

~~~
phil248
But to be fair, those were provisions demanded by the American negotiators,
and have been dropped in the updated CPTPP.

