EU Commissioner Proposes 95 year Copyright

Albanach writes "The European Union Commissioner for the Internal Market has today proposed extending the copyright term for musical recordings to 95 years. He also wishes to investigate options for new levies on blank discs, data storage and music and video players to compensate artists and copyright holders for 'legal copying when listeners burn an extra version of an album to play one at home and one in the car ... People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said.'"

Sweet!

That clinches it, I'm moving back to Europe.

Obviously, Crack is cheaper and more plentiful over there.

Re:Sweet!

The copyright is shorter. Not short enough; I think the twenty years it used to be here in the US is plenty long, and I say that as a copyright holder.

In fact, there are many at slashdot who want to abolish copyright entirely. I think there would be far fewer of these folks if copyrights were sanely limited.

I don't know about Europe, but here in the US we're not supposed to have lifetime copyrights. In fact, our Constitution specifies copyrights and patents are to get artists to create in order that the public domain be enriched, and that they should last "a limited time." SCOTUS fucktards, ignoring the plain language the Constitution was written in, have ruled that "limited" means whatever Congress wants it to mean.

Since all US laws are based on the Constitution, and the Supreme Court is ignoring it, I choose to ignore all the other God damned laws they write and to hell with them.

-mcgrew [slashdot.org]

Re:Sweet!

I don't understand why even the artist is entitled to profiting for their entire life. An economy has only so much budget for creative works. Every penny paid was generated from productivity. It seems wrong that we are putting production resources towards work that has long been compensated.

- Artist does work
- This costs productivity / resources
- Artist gets paid for work by money generated from productivit
- Amount of productivity / resources paid to artist doubles productivity exerted by Artist
- Every time the artist gets paid for this work, productivity and resources are being poured into a black hole. Nothing is being created. Resources are being wasted.

This is just bad economics. In short, people are laboring, and that labor benefits just one person. We can only afford to buy so much art. As the pool of available art increases, the budget for this does not. So we have less available for new works. It's time to free up those resources to put artists to work!

Re:Sweet!

musical artists make their scratch from concerts, not album sales.

So the Beatles didn't make a dime after their last concert in 1966?

Album sales are the sole source of income for many bands that don't tour. Lots of bands and artists that rely on heavy studio production can't effectively take their show on the road and live on album sales alone.

Re:Sweet!

Then they are in the wrong line of work. The explicitly stated purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works, NOT to ensure the lifetime income of works creators. If they want to make more money, start writing/performing new stuff.

Why?

Why should anyone get a lifetime income for one thing they created? If they do, why would they bother creating anything else?

Re:Why?

A lifetime income could be a million dollars a week or it could be 25 cents a month. However 95 years is just plain crazy.

Re:Why?

There's a much simpler solution to that problem anyway: make the copyright end when the artist dies.

Re:Why?

But then, when a successful artist dies in an airplane crash their wife and kids will be bankrupt very soon.

That's what life insurance is for. Guess what, my employer will stop my paychecks when I die as well. The purpose of copyright is not to provide a legacy so your wife and kids will never have to do any productive work.

Re:Why?

Why should anyone get a lifetime income for one thing they created? If they do, why would they bother creating anything else?

Come on, does anyone here honestly believe this has anything at all to do with the actual artists? If someone recorded hits in their teens or twenties, I highly doubt they'll be relying on the pathetic residuals their label deigns to pay them to stay out of the poor house.

The record companies just don't want to give up their revenue on oldies--music from 1958 and prior is now lapsing into the public domain in Europe. This is music from the birth of rock and roll, i.e. Chuck Berry (who still performs at concerts, mind you!), Elvis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and loads more. These are classics that people are still buying new CDs of, putting on their iPods, etc. Chuck's not gonna wind up on the streets because Johnny B. Good can be downloaded legally for free, but the record company still wants their cut. *THAT'S* what this is really all about.

Re:Why?

because it's not your job to make sure they create something else.

It's also not our job to make sure they can live comfortably without working for 70+ years.

It's theirs to do with as they may, and no law you made should be able to take that away from them.

And no law stops them from doing whatever the like with what they create. The law stops you and I from doing whatever *we* like with our copy.

why should you get something from them for free?

Nobody says we should. What people want is to be able to do whatever they want with that something *after* the artist has been compensated for it's creation.

why would you bother creating anything yourself?

Because artists like to create. Most musicians and visual artists in the world today get little or no compensation for their creations, yet they continue to create. Historically, artists have almost never been given decent compensation for the act of creation, and yet history is full of some of the best art (visual and musical) ever created, certainly better than most of the crap we're getting from millionaire artists these days. Inventors will continue to invent without patents, and artists will continue to create without copyrights, because that is who they are.

Re:Why?

Back to the topic a little more, why SHOULDN'T someone profit from something they created for that long?

I make a living from copyright, and I am very lazy. I am completely okay with the idea of being paid in perpetuity for something I create now, but I am also aware that it removes my incentive to create more. The purpose of copyright, sadly, is not for me to get rich. It is to make me (and, more realistically, others) create things that enrich our culture. Imagine if Mozart have been able to keep cashing in on his first symphony for his entire life. Would he have bothered writing the other 40?

Copyright needs to be a balance. A good creator needs to be rewarded well enough that they can make more creating than doing something else, but not so well that they just stop. I remember Terry Pratchett saying (possibly quoting someone else) 'when you stop writing, you aren't an author, you're just some guy who wrote a book once.' The copyright system should reward authors, not guys who wrote a book once (and I say this as a guy who wrote a book once).

Absurd

So get a job, honestly, nobody inherently deserves to be able to survive decades from doing something once early in life unless it was truly highly valuable to society (in which case it should pay for itself, and shouldn't require forced theft of taxpayers to give somebody money for sitting on their butt). Go flip burgers or make new recordings or something, leeching from others is disgusting.

Re:Absurd

So get a job, honestly, nobody inherently deserves to be able to survive decades from doing something once early in life

Or *invest* those earnings from the big hit and live off of that. I have no sympathy for people who were millionaires due to some one time hit and then frittered it away.

Why bother?

Why bother? It's not like anything created by the current artists in their teens will still be listened to five years from now, let alone fifty...

I agree!

I think that the government & various communications companies that I've done work for over the years should pay me for my designs & plans for 95 years after their creation. Why yes, they are works of art!

Re:I agree!

Someone give this guy props and mod him insightful. I won't comment too much, since there are plenty of comments already that point out the absurdity of this.

I'll just reiterate: there's nothing special about what an artist creates. An artist either fills a supply niche with material for which there is demand, or they're just doing intellectual masturbation. And yes, I'm dead serious with that statement.

This means that if an artist can't find a buyer, they don't deserve an income. Now, there's indeed the wrinkle of near-free unlimited distribution of digital copies of their work. Sell your song or painting to one person, and everyone in the world has access to the digital copy. Here are the options to deal with this: make sure that the first sale of the song compensates you for the work you put into it, or get enough people to pay for it to provide enough aggregate compensation. The simplest solution for this is still the tried and true live performance. You can't copy it, because then it wouldn't be live. You can easily calculate how much you need to charge to make a living.

That said, I can live with a certain amount of copyright law. This will make it easier for artists to create income and won't make the creation of art into a rat race of who can copy whose popular work the best. Personally, I'd like to see it be as long as a patent: 20 years. If 20 years is enough time to recoup investment in creating new technology, it is enough time to recoup investment in creating new art. Also, I don't think that copyright should end with the death of the artist. I'm sure there are enough people out there who aren't above killing someone to be able to freely copy and perform a piece of art. Not having the death provision in there will remove an incentive for killing. It's true that it's already illegal to kill someone, but it also doesn't mean we have to give killers a reason to kill.

The stupid. It burns.

Quite honestly, if (like me) you are a European, I guess it's time to kick some butt and make Europe more democratic.

Whoever that Commissioner is, I propose we all sack him. With extreme prejudice, if you see what I mean...

OK, this being said, anyone ready to open a petition against this stooopid copyright extension?

Copyright time should be reduced, not increased

If I do a days work I get paid a days wage, I don't see why it should be that much different for Musicians.

If it takes 6 months to record an album why should they still get paid for the work in 90 years? Copyright time should be reduced, not increased After this time it would become freely distributable. If the time was reduced to 7-10 years this would surely promote creativity.

However the artist should keep control if music was going to be used for other purpose other than listening (movie soundtrack or advert ) and be allowed to permit or deny such use.

This would be a fairer system all round.

Cheers Charlie...

Ruddy hell there are some people who really do give the Irish a bad name....

Charlie McCreevy [europa.eu] is an ex-Irish MP and a chartered accountant whose biggest role was as Minister for Finance in Ireland.

Currently has no registered special interests of note, but damn he has come up with a stupid proposal. Even something sensible like "until death" would have met the requirements for people living longer whereas 95 years is just about the corporations behind the people.

Self defeating

The more ridiculous the so called "intellectual property" laws become, the faster the remaining traces of respect the average person has for them will erode. While there's a valid argument for a short copyright term being beneficial to society, 95 years will only encourage people to ignore the law altogether.

Since when do artists deserve

a lifetime income? Can't they make enough profit off of it the first 50 or so ridiculously long years? Works often make the most money in the beginning of their life, not so many years later when it is no longer in synce with the zeitgeist that imbues so many creative products and fads.

I can't get a lifetime income based on most work I did so many years ago. Neither do others.

The purpose of copyright was to give an incentive to produce and publish material -- and have society benefit both by initially recieving it and then getting it in public domain. Enforcement costs money (police, courts, etcetera), so this time-limited monopoly was a fair arrangement.

But by no means was it to guarantee an income for life. That seems a little too much for just any random creative work when others have to make a day to day living. Not that I believe "it's for the poor starving artists!" line anyway.

Lifetime income?

"lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties, he said."????

When does everyone else get to have lifetime income too? And this only includes productions that were recorded way back when. There is nothing stopping said artist from re-recording a newer version of that hit song (best of...) that will have the same copyright protections.

Why do artists and government officials think that Copyright means 'money for forever?'

WHAT?

People are living longer and 50 years of copyright protection no longer give lifetime income to artists who recorded hits in their late teens or early twenties

The commissioner is either ignorant or lying. I don't know which one is worse.

The chosen term was 70 years from the death of the author (post mortem auctoris) for authors' rights (Art. 1), longer than the 50 year post mortem auctoris term required by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Art. 7.1 Berne Convention). (Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])

He should mean that the artists' children can enjoy the royalties for mere 50 years after their parent has died. Cry me a river.

You FAIL

I hereby copyright Trolling. Nobody is allowed to troll without my permission. License fees start at 100 BILLION dollars.

Sorry punk. You can only copyright your own troll posts. Provided the act of trolling weren't patented, which it is, by me.

My lawyers will be in touch.

Sincerely,

Mr. Underbridge

Resident Troll