So, the EU has increased the term of copyright on performance art from 50 to 95 years. This makes sense; after all, 50 years will often run out while the creator is still alive.

But never mind this. After all, people might not have free access to the songs of World War II! It's nice and all that some of the people who wrote those songs are still alive, but their personal interest in being paid for what they did must be subjugated to the "right of all people everywhere" to "a shared cultural heritage". As Yann from France says, "extension of copyright term is not beneficial to the public".

Oh, and publishing last names with petitions is clearly another relic of the proprietary culture era. Us enlightened free culture folk just need to publish our first names and country.

I agree with Yann from France.

Even Shirley Temple Black isn't likely to live long enough to benefit herself from such an extension. Fifty years is plenty.

This is a good post Amarkov. It is a complicated matter and you have outlined good arguments opposing the rather weak, Stallman inspired argument that the Veropedia petition puts forward. I want to consider what others have to say and think about it for awhile before I weigh in in a more substantive way.

I guess the Wikipedian had to use their first names because their username would hardly inspire respect by the EU Commissioner.




Tell that to 284,061 (and counting) Muslims.

Online petitions rarely accomplish anything, whether their cause is good, bad, or indifferent. They're just too easily gameable, and hence so easily dismissed that it's rare for anybody to actually change their opinion or action on anything as a result of a petition.

Wow, they're giving their first names?! AND their country?!

Watch out, the EU will have them "living in England in a similar way"!

But ^demon also wants WMF to issue a symbolic resolution! When confronted with a petition from the free culture movement and a symbolic resolution from the Wikimedia Foundation, the EU will have to cave in!

I mean, just look at the signature page! This decision is a "grave moral error" and "ridiculous". It's also a plot to avoid anything entering the public domain; this "harms the free-content movement, [therefore] it cannot be allowed to pass". And Jason from the United States says "this is horse crap". Surely now the EU will reconsider!

Okay, I've been trying not to reply to this topic, because I know that I've made my position extremely clear in several other threads....

But this is just so stupid:



Yes, but when you do a job, you should get PAID for it! That's the whole point. In our society, the consumer pays for the job. In the USSR, the State paid for composers to write music and their music was free for State-sponsored events because....they were being provided housing, food, medical care, and money for WHATEVER in exchange for free use of the musical content.

So, is Veropedia intending on providing medical coverage for the people whose rights they are trying to take away? Maybe Danny is planning on allowing these artists the right to live free in his place in Florida during their vacations?

It's so simple, people.

Creating art is a JOB. Someone who does a JOB gets PAID for use of their work. When people die, they leave family, who deserve to also profit from the work that the creator has done during their lifetime.

In many EU states, the life expectency is between 70-80 years, depending on sex, location etc. If somebody starts their career at 20 (and many pop stars only have success when they're young and attractive....), that would leave 50-60 years for them to profit from their careers. It would also leave 45-35 years from their children and grandchildren to benefit from their work.

Was is this unreasonable? I keep saying the same thing over and over again, but I have personally seen these laws providing for aged composers and allowing them to die in peace knowing that their heirs will be taken care of.

Why is this a bad thing? Don't we all want that?

Personally, I do hope that WMF decides to make this an issue with the EU, because it will make my work telling EU officials not to give them any grant money that much easier!!

You mean JzG or Durova or NewYorkBrad wouldn't be recognized as legitimate names?

Not emo or notable enough? LOL!

In free culture world, your rights to payment are subjugated to everyone else's "right" to access your work freely. After all, free culture benefits all of humanity, while decently long copyright terms only benefit the few who create things.

Does anyone understand how Jimbo doesn't see Objectivism and the free culture movement as contradictory?

Yes, but we're not (thankfully) in a "Free-culture" world yet.

Since Jimbo made his money by getting young, impressionable women to take their clothes off and allow him to use their pictures for....what, probably half a month's rent at the most??...it's not surprising that he's trying to make a buck on using other people's property.

Somebody should make Jimbo do a nude centerfold and let him see how he feels about having his naked body there for everybody to see...

I guess I'll be the minority here and say that I think 95 years is too short?

I love public domain stuff, but I also think that these copyrights should be generational - i.e., the copyright on 1984 will follow Orwell's kids, at the very least. I dunno, it's complicated, but anything that protects the rights of people to profit off of their work while still allowing for the fair use of those works in identification, scholarship, and criticism is fine by me. The more the merrier.

Can anyone explain "copyright on performance art?" Does this mean the recording of The Beatles performing "Rubber Soul" would be have a copyright term of 95 years yet the music and words to Norwegian Wood would only have a term of 50 years? Or am I reading something into this that is not there. I can see some basis for a longer term for the right to derive income from a performance, which does not have as great of barrier to the production of new "covers" of the material.

There is probably some detailed legal definition. The fact a distinction is being made shows the usual under-the-table politics at work re: IP law. Super-rich musicians (or whatever amounts to "performance artist") get their lobbyists to suck the dicks of the politicians, but hand-to-mouth painters or writers (or whatever "non performance" art happens to be), they can just pony up their own millions in bribes.

IP law is a convoluted, and as corrupt, as tax law is. Reformat that hard-drive, I say. There are other ways of making money creating stuff. The children of these "artists" can, and will, get a job like the rest us.

I agree about the corrupting influence of lobbyist Even worse most of the financial value is appropriated by corporate types, like oil companies suck up mineral rights, and not artists at all. What that Mick and Boys would call "Gray Suited Grafters." The 1998 extension of the term of copyright law in U.S. was largely the effort of one corporation, Disney, faced with "Steamboat Willey" the progenitor of Mickey Mouse, about to fall into the public domain.

They're up to 40 signatures now, and probably a combined disposable annual income of $12,428 and 73 cents. This is a force to be reckoned with!

Next petition -- include "Spinning Plates on Sticks" at the 2012 Summer Olympics!

I don't agree that artists should be entitled to profit indefinitely from their work (during their own lifetimes), so I certainly don't agree that their children and grandchildren deserve to profit from it after the artist dies. Why does anyone deserve to profit from what somebody else did?

"Grave moral error"!? The free culture people are never at a loss for overheated rhetoric. Frankly, it's currently weird how the EU treats musical recordings much worse than literature. This helps even things out.

And yeah, yeah, it helps the Beatles recordings a lot, but this is a nuanced issue, and I immediately tune out those who fail to appreciate the complexity.

Because it's one of the main reasons the "somebody else" did it in the first place?

In effect, you're saying that artists shouldn't be allowed to bequeath their work and the benefits from it to their heirs, which is something that any owner of a family business, rental property, or organized crime syndicate can do as a matter of course.

Remember, we already put artists in a crappy position, at least in the USA, by making it difficult for all varieties of self-employed individuals to get decent health insurance, retirement plans, and downtown parking spaces.

New pearls of wisdom from the "signatures". Apparently, even 50 years of copyright is an abomination. We know this because Shakespeare, Descartes, and Aristotle did not enjoy copyright protection. I mean, any artist should be able to follow the Shakespearian method of patronage by the monarch, or the Descartian path of selling off all their surplus property. And failing that, they can at least follow Aristotle and be an aristocrat. Anyone who cannot do these things is simply unfit to be an artist.

I wonder how many people actually realize that this isn't about literature?

Just to clarify what this issue is: The EU decision doesn't affect the rights of authors, composers or the actual creators. Those rights remain, for the time being, at a term of life of the creator plus 70 years. I've heard rumblings about that perhaps being extended to 85 years in the near future, but that's not been decided yet.

This decision is talking about a type of right which I believe doesn't even exist in the US, which is the rights of performers to their interpretations of songs. If you don't think this is important, consider whether Charlie Parker playing "April in Paris" is more about Parker or about Duke and Harburg...The answer is that Parker playing this standard is a unique quality and his re-interpretation of an existing work adds value and should be respected. So, when a recording of this is used for radio, television or film, a payment is made to a Performance Rights organization for the Composers and lyricists and another payment (which is usually substantially smaller) is made to another Performance rights organization for the rights of artists.

I get checks from this sort of thing from time to time, and it's not nearly as much money as I get from my own compositions...but for people who have high-power pop music careers, it can be a substantial amount of money.

I'm sure that once everybody else agrees to work for the World for free and thus allows musicians to eat, sleep, have their toilets fixed and their cavities filled for nothing, creators won't need to have these rights paid. Since I don't see this happening at any time in the near future, I really don't see why it's such a big deal to pay a few cents when you use somebody else's work.

So when my grandfather died, his estate should have been appropriated by the Government because my father had no right to benefit from money my grandfather earnt?

Free culture? You get what you pay for.

I don't think it is something deserved, no (I don't believe inheritance in general is deserved), but in the case of copyright we are talking about something that meaningfully affects the interests of the public. Why should the interests of a few heirs outweigh the interests of the public? Why should I sympathize with someone's desire to make money off of an ancestor's work? It really comes down to how you balance the interests of individuals against the interests of society.

So suppose someone owns a beautiful old house with large grounds. People would like to admire the inside of that house and let their children play in the grounds. The owner objects. Then he dies. Ah, good - sorry he's died, but now I can use the house and grounds. Oh no! His son has inherited it and has the same selfish policy of not letting the general public tramp through his house and garden. That meaningfully affects the interests of the public. Why should the interests of this heir outweigh the interests of the public?

Even worse, suppose this son agrees to let people into his house for payment. Why should I sympathize with someone's desire to make money off his father's work?

I must admit, I'm not being a very good socialist, but then we Blairites have rather abandoned Clause 4.

Because then people would have far less incentive to create, build, develop, and improve things?

Even if that weren't the case, this argument has just never worked for me. In 99.99 percent of cases, these "selfish heirs" aren't suppressing the material in question, they're simply taking a percentage or charging a licensing fee. The material is still readily available, but instead of getting it for free, you have to pay something for it. So the real question is whether or not the public interest is served by the public having to pay for things that might be considered "cultural material," but if you accept that argument, why not extend it to other things too, like food, water, clothing, and shelter? Presumably it would be in the public interest for those things to be free too, right? I mean, sure, that would be great for the consumer, but there's that phony-baloney "economy" thing we have to worry about.

Mind you, I'm fully in support of laws that prevent estates from suppressing currently-available copyrighted works completely, but that almost never happens.

Once you officially let something out (as in print it, record it or film it and then distribute the copies), it's next to impossible to make it unavailable. As a matter of fact, it's a legal right for others to be able to use the work as long as 1. it's the work as the creator created it and 2. you have paid for its use (and this rate is decided collectively in most cases, to avoid abuse).

The only way to stop something from circulating is when you can prove that it has been deformed and is no longer the work of the composer. I just got an email from two musicians who were upset because Kraftwerk would not approve a remix that they had done, but since they changed the work (translating the lyrics to Swedish and changing the overall sound of the original---Nobody's going to argue that the Sound of Kraftwerk isn't a big part of what they did, I hope!), the original creators decided to forbid this new version. That was their right.

But if somebody takes my string quartet (already recorded once) wants to make a recording using the instruments I specified, and pays for the rights, I cannot stop them from doing so because they have the right to do that. If I tried, I would have to prove that they did not respect my work and even if I personally don't like their performance, the law is going to be more sympathetic to the people who bought the music, made the recording, paid for its pressing and also paid for its use.

It's all about mutual respect, in a climate of "assuming good faith". "Mashups", "GFDL collaborations", "derivative works" etc etc etc do not seem to be about mutual respect and assuming good faith, as Wikipedia has underlined on more than one occasion that I can remember...

Oh! Is it still available? What's the CD catalogue number?

Sorry, no personal information. I hope you understand.

(yes, it is still available. If you follow new music, you probably already have it anyway.)

Last names and e-mail addresses /are/ stored, just not displayed. I did this to help protect people's privacy as some are not comfortable with their entire name being public. When I print and bind the signatures (which I fully intend to), I will be publishing the full names and e-mail addresses. Honestly, if you dislike the petition for ideological reasons, by all means do so, but don't attack me over my choice of presentation.

Any other questions?

Yes, why do you consider this to be any of your business in the first place?

If people aren't comfortable with their full name being public, they shouldn't be signing a petition. That's how it works everywhere else...

I feel that this expansion of copyright exists solely to benefit the various companies within the recording industry, and not society at large. I do believe copyright certainly has its place in protecting the rights of those who work to make new creative content, and certainly they deserve compensation. I take issue with excessive measures such as this that only hinder free distribution of content.

In RE: to Amarkov. I know, and that's why the full names will be included in the official version sent out. Many people are willing to sign their name on something, they just don't want the whole world to know their full name. Is the semantics of hiding/showing the name that big of a deal? I believe you're trying to make an issue of a non-issue, to be honest.

Is someone here responsible for this? Boy, do I hope so...

Which free distribution are you referring to here? This is always the crux of the matter. As is the case with many things, it is all a question of whether money was made or not.

If you are speaking of free distribution as the liberty to personally access and show to others in your own personal activities, you already have that. You can invite friends over to your home and all watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster together or you can play a recording of your favorite song or you can sing "Happy Birthday" to your daughter in your dining room, all without anyone being able to stop you or make you pay anything. This is your right as a human being, at least in most parts of the World.

This changes if you're making your friends pay a fee to see the movie in your home, if you're selling copies of the recording in question, or if you're a professional party-organizer who makes his or her living off of singing "happy birthday" to children. In this case, the people who created the work, whose work you are using to create a profit, deserve to be paid a fee for the use of their work in your profit-making activities.

Because Society exists to protect the rights of all, Society has created a system in which creators are compensated and people have access to the information and artistic content that they need, with fair compensation paid to those who created the content. Society has decided that this is beneficial to all, because it protects both the rights of the creators to be paid and for all to access to those works, once this compensation has been paid. The system works both ways, outlining how creators are compensated and how consumers are to have to free access to those works in exchange for compensation. My liberty to create and your liberty to choose what creations you wish to experience is guaranteed by....an financial transaction. This is how value is defined currently in our Society. If you have other ideas about how to define value, I'm sure that Society will be very interested in hearing about them, but don't be too terribly surprised if they decide that it's easier to stay with the current system, for the time being at least...

It seems to me, however, is that what you are implying is that Society would be better served if all intellectual content were free as in beer and that anyone could do anything with anyone else's work, without any restrictions at all.

This reminds me of those TV commercials back in the 70s where you would have an album which had "25 Superhits", of which you would hear about three seconds of each, which were enough to make out which tune it was, but not enough to really identify who was actually singing. Some people would order the record and when it arrived, you'd find out that the "25 hits" in question were the actual songs, but were performed by some cover band who sounded enough like the originals to get you to buy the recording, but not enough to actually fool you into thinking that the original artists were singing. Many people felt cheated by this, and rightly so: they weren't interested in hearing only the songs: they wanted to have the original performances. I rather doubt that many of the people who were duped into buying these recordings would consider that Society was served by their existence.

If anyone can do anything to anyone's work and call it anything they way, and then distribute it freely anywhere...the end result is a lot of meaningless noise which does no good to anyone. However, those of you working on Wiki-projects probably already know this already.

If people can't have their first name, last name and city, at least, on your online petition, I fail to see how it could be credible at all.

This is possibly of a fair point. The old works were created under a different regime with lower incentives. While it would be sensible to craft some narrowly-tailored extensions to protect fragile media like film, an across-the-board extension could sanely be called a subsidy.

But then, you also claim this "only hinder[s] free distribution of content," which is obviously hyperbole. Here's a question: would you oppose the extension if it were non-retroactive?

I would be more inclined to support it, yes. It depends on the exact nature of the deal. To reply to you (and to the fieryangel above), I would like to say that I am not against copyright in and of itself. I feel that copyright should exist in order to protect the rights of those who work hard producing creative content. However, I feel that Life+75 years is excessive. What good does it do to earn money after you are dead? Same thing with 95 years. If you perform a song when you are twenty, you can earn royalties from it up until you're 115 (assuming this was passed). Now, most people don't live to that age. Assuming you live to 95, that's still 20 years of revenue that the record company is making from your music. And /that/ is what I feel is unfair.

Look, please read this slowly: Creators have families. When they die, they worry about what their son/daughter/grandson/fifth wife/gay lover/favorite student is going to do. The idea that these people are going inherit a right which makes it easier for them to transition to something else is, indeed, a comfort.

Now, do you know what we're talking about? We're talking about a share of a nine and one-half cent US dollar royalty per song! This is divided between the publisher, composer, lyricist, record producer, featured singer, non-featured instrumentalists and non-featured vocal backup singers.

We're indeed talking about billions of dollars, but NOT a huge sum for any one party.

The point is, the system ONLY WORKS if everybody pays their share!

So, shut up and pay your nine and one-half cents per song, already!

Sheez!

Welcome to Marxism-Leninism 2.0

This isn't really true. You can sell future expected earnings because copyrights are transferable. In a rational market these earnings will be based partially off the duration of the copyright. So for example: if copyrights were 95 years, you can accumulate 45 years of royalties and sell the last 50 years before you're dead. This sale price will greatly exceed the price you would get if copyrights lasted only 50 years.

I do grant that long copyrights capture almost all of the possible value of an indefinite copyright. That is, a rational agent would buy a 95 year copyright term for almost the same price as an indefinite copyright, or for that matter, a 75 year right. What makes the longer rights potentially more valuable is the slim chance that the work will be discovered years after it's created, but companies (at least) are not willing to invest for this slim chance. But an individual can certainly benefit from post-death copyright terms.

Really, this isn't the issue though. I think the greatest evil of our current system is not the length of the term. Works that are still profitable are still for sale, and royalties don't really "hinder the distribution of free content" in any sane way.

The evil of the current system is orphan works. If it weren't for this problem, I would probably support an infinite copyright term. Copyright would have to be renewed though: somebody should have to care enough about the work to pay a couple of bucks to renew it. That way would-be publishers could determine who owns it. The Beatles would get renewed indefinitely, and that's fine because obscure works would fall into the public domain where they can be better distributed.

The current uncertainty of orphan works is what keeps them from the public, and if the EU required registration for the extra years, I would fully support their extension.

This isn't so much about who wrote what, those are known as publishing rights in Europe. This is about performing rights. The example often quoted is The Beatles. The copyright on the songs The Beatles wrote is 95 years, which means John and Paul have royalties for 95 years because they wrote the songs. However Ringo, who only played on the songs, gets performing rights, along with the other three. Those perfoming rights used to end after 50 years. They're extending those performance rights an extra 45 years to match the length of the writing. So a possible analogy is that Henry Ford would be paid royalties for the same amount of time as the panel beater who helped build the first Model T. A sloppy and poor analogy, but I hope it clarifies the point. In Europe a lot of record company executives make sure they are credited as playing the triangle or something on all recordings they oversee, so they are quids in if the record really sells. Money, after all is what they want.

Yes, so there are some greedy record execs out there.

How does this effect the fact that there are laws which protect performers' rights and the rights of their estates?

A more fair solution would be to put the performers' rights on the same term as the composers' rights; which is life plus seventy years.

Of course, that would be longer, but more fair.

....and you all know that the composers' rights are going to extended to 85 years very soon, don't you?