Re: Music Industry Halting Mass Suits

On Dec 22, 1:08 pm, Steve Hawkins <res0p...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
*** thaxter <dthax...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote innews:41737c63-2d43-46d5-8fcb-1d2569387bdb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:



On Dec 22, 11:44 am, Steve Hawkins <res0p...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
*** thaxter <dthax...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:c07c676e-3e6c-40ad-be10-
bbc4a2e93...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

On Dec 21, 11:42 pm, Jenn <jenncondu...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<f5f5337d-b93d-467c-a181-cfdba6a50...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
,  "Tom Hendricks / Musea" <tom-hendri...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Here's something no one is considering.
the copyrights have been extended too long, and NO ONE should
own their music after 50 years.

I'm sure that I'll be sorry for asking, but...why?

This thread is probably not the best place to discuss the
extensions of copyright that have occurred in the last 30 years,
but here's some basic info:

Copyright was (until the 1970's) for a term of 28 years, optionally
renewable for 28--but you had to renew or lose your copyright.
Various laws have extended the term almost indefinitely, and
recorded sound in particular has been grandfathered in so that
almost nothing after 1923 is public domain.

This means that the vast majority of recordings made between 1900
and 1960 or so are commercially unavailable and won't be reissued.
 So they will go unheard--unless you're a professional researcher
who has the time to come to somewhere like the Library of Congress
to listen. Can't put them up on the web and publishers won't really
give up any rights even if they have no commercial plans for these
libraries.

Why shouldn't the original Mickey Mouse cartoons from the 1920's
pass into PD?  Why should Irving Berlin's copyrights from the
1920's be still enforced?  This was not the law when they were
published and registered, but Congress has voted with the Hollywood
lobby time and time again to almost indefinitely extend copyright
when the law for over a century had never intended that.

Granted, Hollywood has locked up a lot of material in a cover all the
bases, just in case move, but I still disagree from the viewpoint of
an individual artist.  Is the real issue having to pay Hollywood to
use an
d
distribute those works?

What's wrong with handing down the rights, especially if the material
was valuable/popular, to your family or whatever?  Might be a charity
or school, for that matter.  What about the young artist who has a
still popular hit when he reaches middle age?

It's almost like "Nationalizing" someone's private property.  The
decision should belong to the artist, IMHO.

Steve Hawkins

Steve,

Who said anything was wrong with handing down rights to next
generations?  No problem with that, but it's never been intended to be
in perpetuity.

And why not?  Why is art not governed by the same rules as other private
property?  Picture all private property subject to such rules.



The original term of copyright throughout most of the 20th Century was
28 + 28.
The extension to life plus 50 years is plenty.  Recent extensions have
gone beyond that and the complicated case of sound recordings (which
were not covered at all under federal law until 1972) has everything
from 1923 and on protected until 2067 or later.

Do you honestly believe that NOTHING should be public domain?  The
copyright laws always recognized that there was a limited term.

If you're interested in reading more here's a couple of articles on
the impact of keeping all of this vast body of recorded sound
unavailable.

http://www.arsc-audio.org/pdf/ARSC-MLAcopyright.pdf

http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub135/contents.html

I'm a bit confused.  You talk about taking an Artist's property and
making it Public Domain, whether they or the holder want to or not.  The
articles you cited seem to be only concerned about using modern
technology to preserve music written prior to 1972.  Apparently, current
Copyright laws make that difficult due to concerns about the ease of
unauthorized distribution on the web or something to that effect.

I see no reason the law can't be tweaked to allow preservation efforts
and still leave the ownership with the artist or their estate.

Steve Hawkins

Steve,

I'm talking about the term of copyright ending at some point as the
laws of almost every country provide. I'm confused by your view--is
copyright in perpetuity? So the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Bach,
Beethoven should all be protected? There's a real public benefit to
works passing into the public domain. Otherwise, there's the danger
of them being lost forever. And that would be the case with the vast
majority of intellectual property that's produced--say by Homer's less
famous cousin Jethro.

The articles I referenced aren't about music--they are about sound
recordings. Music has been covered by the U.S. copyright laws since
their inception. Sound recordings--the fixing the of the sound of a
performance--were not covered until 1972 and are now in kind of a
strange limbo. They are deemed to be covered by various state laws
before that, but the net effect is that no sound recording from 1923
on passes into p.d. until at least 2067.

There are 3 million sound recordings in the building I'm sitting in.
Ninety something percent would probably be considered "orphaned"--
there's no reissues, there's no possibility of future reissue because
it's not commercially viable, there's no tracking down the original
copyright holders. So the only way anyone would ever hear it is to
come to DC and listen in person. And to do that we require that
you're working on a serious research project. We'll be digitizing it
systematically and would love to make it widely available.

We have millions of p.d. works on our website. If copyright were
forever all of those civil war photos and maps, Edison motion
pictures, 19th century *** music publications, the papers of George
Washington, etc. would not be easily available. I can't believe that
would be a good thing.

.

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