

Reasonable Anger In Europe Over Ridiculous Copyright Extension - nextparadigms
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110913/03591515929/reasonable-anger-europe-over-ridiculous-copyright-extension.shtml

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praptak
Hey copyright hoarders. We had a deal. The society granted you a limited time
monopoly in exchange for the works going into the public domain after this
time. You broke this deal by hands of corrupt politicians. I do not feel
obliged to keep my end of this deal anymore.

~~~
BadassFractal
Too bad they can still sue the shit out of you if you lose the bittorrent
lottery and your IP is selected for public exemplary punishment.

~~~
tomjen3
Which isn't likely to be a concern anymore, since most people here would be
smart enough to either use a private tracker (which isn't selected) or to use
some filehost like rapidshare.

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nextparadigms
Obviously the labels are doing it for themselves, but even their argument that
they're doing it for the (very old) artists isn't a good one. The purpose of
the copyright was to ultimately create a richer culture, and to do that they
needed artists to create works of art, but once they do that, the period of
time for which they own the copyright should be optimized for "minimization"
not maximization, so the society at large can benefit from them.

Copyiright was designed to ultimately help the society. Helping the artists
protect their works is just a step towards that goal, not the goal itself. But
sadly the labels are trying to make protecting the works the ultimate and
_only_ goal of copyright, because they get to benefit even more than the
artists themselves from that.

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pyre
I think that the advertisement incident in the UK a few yeats back was
telling. A full page advert with a list of artists that supposedly supported
the copyright extension. People noticed that some of the artists on the list
weren't even alive, and some artists came out that they were never asked if
they supported it or not.

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cHalgan
I just want to point one thing: As China is becoming the super-power (engine
of the world), their view how copyright should be handled will become
prevalent.

In other words, the majority of money to be made will be in Chindia and not in
Europe and US. We need to prepare for that.

~~~
hxa7241
The USA will find the weapon of IP law etc. it has been building all over the
world turned against it.

One would expect China and India to follow USA commercial practice and use the
established structures of IP. But USA-IP is not intended to be good economics
in the real sense, it is supposed to benefit the USA. When the USA is a net
importer, it will be the loser. It will start to disavow international IP.

But IP is fairly dumb in an information economy so it must die out in the not
too distant future anyway.

~~~
jerf
Historically speaking, it is far more likely than in 10-20 years, China will
"see the light" and institute much stronger IP laws, once they have more stuff
to protect, because your proposal is unstable; if the US starts disrespecting
Chinese copyright, the historical outcome is a treaty, not mutual disrespect.
If mutual disrespect were the stable outcome, we'd already see that.

~~~
hxa7241
Well, yes, disavowal is too strong: the USA will just try to reduce
(international) IP. The main point is the turnaround.

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akkartik
Wait, so composers and lyricists get life+70 years? How long has _that_ been
going on?

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8759524/Will-
copy...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8759524/Will-copyright-
extensions-ever-end.html)

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buff-a
FTA: _They've sold out the public, who they're supposed to represent._

People keep saying this like its an opinion. This is the central fact of
modern day politicians and government bureaucrats. Lets stop fucking talking
about it. Lets get a voter measure on the ballot to criminalize it.

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RexRollman
I don't believe that a living creator should have to suffer their creations
going into the public domain. Once dead, however, their works should
transition to the public domain.

~~~
ltamake
> Once dead, however, their works should transition to the public domain.

So we can make their work free once they're dead? That doesn't seem fair.
What's wrong with something going into the public domain? It's not terrible.

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felipemnoa
Plus the chances of an "accident" occurring to the creator of very popular
content increase.

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nirvana
Any time period is going to be essentially arbitrary... but it seems to me
that 20 years like patents, or maybe 30 years is plenty of time for the
creator to derive value in the marketplace from their work.

These were never meant to be eternal, for good reason, and constantly
extending them to me seems very corrupt... that this is favoring one group's
interests over another.

~~~
dredmorbius
This can (and has been) modeled using future value analysis (from economics).
Since future payments are discounted (based on interest and inflation),
extending copyright means that the value _now_ of creating a new work
increases but by smaller and smaller amounts. Somewhere in the 15-30 year
range is about "right" according to most studies -- the additional value of
even an infinite extension is minimal at this point.

Then there's the economic value of a work: very few copyrighted works have an
economic life of one year, let alone a century. This is particularly true
since copyright protections were extended to _all_ works rather than just
those which were registered with a copyright office (this post is copyrighted,
however my economic interest in it is nil, still, it will extend for the next
120 years).

The real argument for extensions is _copyright term in works of enduring value
whose copyright is about to expire_. This is the "Mickey Mouse Copyright Law"
in the US. Walt Disney's first Mickey Mouse cartoon, "Steamboat Willie"
(itself borrowing very heavily from earlier works) was published in 1928, and
there's been a strong trend in extension to prevent works from at least this
date from ever entering the public domain.

This results in the exceptionally strong protections of copyright being
extended to a huge volume of valueless (and often ownerless in the sense that
no true owner can be identified or contacted) to protect a very small number
of works of enduring economic value, though by no means does this promote the
directive in the US Constitution "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" (other nations
have their own justifications).

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jerf
While I'd love to see copyright terms just tuned down across the board, I
could deal with a system whereby the next extensions required explicit
renewals. For practicality's sake I might even be willing to put up with
allowing owners to file one form for their entire catalog rather than
enumerating everything, because if nothing else at least this would clear the
zombie owner backlog.

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nkassis
I agree with this and I think you could even scale the fee for renewal up over
time to discourage just automatic renewal of stuff that has almost no
commercial value anymore. Seriously I could care less if disney wants to keep
paying for steamboat willie to stay copyrighted as long as the fee keeps going
up making them think about the value of doing so.

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pointyhat
I genuinely give as much of a shit as I did before they extended it and I'm
sure that is the case for the rest of the population.

This is more about PR and marketing than it is about law.

