11 ms·
Congress wants to extend the copyright on some sound recordings to 144 years
- Clubber 8y agoIt'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 8y agoCopyright 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 8y agoI don't accept that for a moment. Monopoly over land predates humans, as any observation of territorial creatures will let you know.
- rayiner 8y agoTerritorial 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 8y agoI 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 8y agoI'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".
- mywittyname 8y ago> Having the State send men with guns in response to that action is a highly artificial deprivation of that natural right. Pack animals will do the same. If you attempt to take their property, the leader (State) will likely engage with you.
- harryh 8y agoAnimals might have monopoly over land that they are physically standing on and protecting right this very second. But they have no concept of property: land in some other place far away from them that somehow remains theirs even if they aren't there or never intend to go there. That sort of property is solely a creation of the modern state.
- thomastjeffery 8y agoOne is a monopoly on a physical object, the other is a monopoly on an idea. Ideas are far more abstract.
- rayiner 8y agoCopyright is a monopoly on a specific creative work, not an idea. It’s intangible but it’s not an idea (Microsoft Windows for example, isn’t an “idea”). It’s a product of labor, just like a house you built.
- thomastjeffery 8y agoThat intangibility is what I am trying to get at: If someone builds an exact copy of your house across the street, you don't lose anything. The idea that you should be allowed to prevent them from doing so is copyright.
- dctoedt 8y ago> Copyright is a monopoly on a specific creative work, not an idea. But courts — urged on by copyright owners — have extended the scope of copyright protection to nonliteral aspects such as (for example) look and feel and structure, sequence, and organization. Sometimes this is done while paying lip service to the principle that copyright doesn't protect ideas. The resulting fuzziness of the boundaries is one of the major sources of complaint.
- Strang 8y agoThat's a very unconventional view. I'd argue that as presented it is based on an over-simplification of copyright. Specifically, "something that didn't exist before the person who created it" and "everyone can have as much of it as they want so long as they're willing to create their own" do not seem to accurately describe copyright law to me.
- rayiner 8y agoI don't think it's unconventional. Almost nobody outside certain circles cares about the "public domain." It's a romantic idea that has little relevance. And why do you think that description of copyright law is inaccurate? Copyright protects concrete expression, not abstract ideas, and independent creation is a defense to copyright infringement. How many sci-fi books are basically identical and rehash the same tropes? That's not copyright infringement. It's only infringement if you actually copy someone else's work.
- gnode 8y ago> It's only infringement if you actually copy someone else's work. This is inaccurate. Copyright has been extended to cover fictional characters for instance. Consider that at the copyright term of 144 years proposed, the character of Count Dracula would still be under copyright, and not freely usable for artistic works.
- wahern 8y agoUnlike patent law which protects novelty, copyright only protects originality. Violating copyright requires actual copying of material. Theoretically, you could independently conceive of Count Dracula[1] and put him into your own work without violating someone else's copyright. To prove violation of copyright the copyright holder must as a preliminary matter provide evidence that the defendant likely had access or exposure to the copyrighted material. Only once that evidence exists could the fact finder infer, based on similarity, actual copying. For widely disseminated pop cultural material, however, exposure is a rather easy burden to meet. [1] I presume for the sake of argument that the character Count Dracula is per se copyrighted. But I don't think that's true. AFAIU only certain stylized versions of that character are copyrighted. This necessarily follows from the fact that to show violation of copyright you must first identify the specific material that has been copied, and then show substantive similarity and the extent of copying. IMO modern copyright law is too liberal in this regard (i.e. favors copyright holders) and has gotten rid of many bright line rules that rejected infringement claims early on. But all of this absolutely matters if you're going to trial. The Oracle v Google case was fundamentally about how to construe similarity and extent in the context of APIs.
- gnode 8y agoI don't think it's sensible to refer to all ownership of land as monopolistic. In most cases land is fungible. There are many landowners in my town of plots of land which are largely interchangeable. Saying someone has a monopoly on their specific plot of land is about as relevant as saying someone has a monopoly on a specific cheeseburger. If one party were to own all the land in a particular region, like a feudal lord, that may be considered monopolistic. The case with copyright is that copyrighted works are by definition not fungible; if you create a trivially similar work, you violate the copyright.
- ModernMech 8y ago> In most cases land is fungible. Err, there's a reason the first three rules of real estate are 1. location 2. location 3. location The key thing about land is that it's unique, there is no other place on the entire planet identical to the place you're standing. There may be similar places, and that may be fine enough for some people. But plenty of wars have been fought over a particular piece of land. Just ask the Palestinians if land is fungible.
- gnode 8y agoI was referring to a local basis. I.e. in most cases, plots of land of equal size on a given street are of similar value for similar purposes. My point is that people don't typically monopolise land to the extent that a prospective land buyer has one potential current owner they could deal with. Of course there are always exceptional cases where this breaks down.
- Dylan16807 8y agoAre the Palestinians being offered similar land? That fight seems pretty all or nothing. But more importantly, very few bits of land are all that special. Location, location, location means that if a business got its pick of nearby plots, most would happily switch, and reap the benefits!
- chimeracoder 8y ago> Just ask the Palestinians if land is fungible. That analogy would only make sense if Palestinians were being offered similarly-sized and similarly-resourced land, to compensate for what was taken away from them at the beginning of the Nakba 70 years ago. Except, they're not. The land was seized, with no new land provided in return. Over time, more and more has been occupied and taken away from Palestine.
- chimeracoder 8y ago> Gotta love corrupt America. Ah yes, as opposed to all the other developed European countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., which all signed the TPP/TTIP, which contains similar massive copyright extensions.
- test6554 8y agoHere's the EFF link to contact your senator: https://act.eff.org/action/stop-another-expansion-of-copyright-tell-the-senate-to-vote-no-on-s-2823 https://act.eff.org/action/stop-another-expansion-of-copyrig... 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 8y agoI 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.
- trumped 8y agoWhich recording was this bill written for?
- sandworm101 8y agoElvis. Then the early beatles stuff. In the next couple decades some actual pop songs are ready to hit public domain.
- xamuel 8y agoWait, 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 8y agoNow, 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.
- rhino369 8y agoExtending 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 8y agoIs 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?
- hedora 8y agoYes. A reasonable rate of real return plus inflation is 7%. 1.07^144 is 17,000. So, if the album costs $10 in 2018 dollars, it should cost $170,000 at expiration. Figuring in inflation and conservative returns give 5% per year, so 1125x markup. The album would only be $11,250 in 2018 dollars at term expiration.
- pavpanchekha 8y agoGenerally you imagine that future money decreases in value (in real terms). For example, you need to at least beat inflation-protected bonds! So in order to get constant real terms over the life of a piece of art, the actual price to consume has to increase exponentially over time. But in fact we get the sense that most art drops in consumer value over time (how many times have you listened to Gangnam Style in the last month?) so exponentially increasing price would not bring linear return.
- dsr_ 8y agoOnly 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.
- JackCh 8y ago> 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).
- rayiner 8y agoThe focus of the act is actually on modernizing licensing for streaming: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/congress-is-giving-musicians-first-chance-of-fair-pay-in-decades-w520301 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/congress-is-giving-m....
- stochastic_monk 8y agoThe important thing here is that primarily good MMA has been bundled with the CLASSICS Act. From the EFF commentary: "The CLASSICS Act gives nothing back to the public. It doesn’t increase access to pre-1972 recordings, which are already played regularly on Internet radio. And it doesn’t let the public use these recordings without permission any sooner. While some recording artists and their heirs will receive money under the act, the main beneficiaries will be recording companies, who will control the use of classic recordings for another fifty years. Important recordings from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s won’t enter the public domain until 2067. And users of recordings that are already over 90 years old will face the risk of federal copyright’s massive, unpredictable penalties." This is much, much more about record labels getting money rather than creators of content. The industry already heavily rewards purveyors rather than generators; if anything, this makes things worse.
- infogulch 8y agoThere has got to be a way of preventing "bundling". Bundling unrelated laws together is the cause of so much strife. Tacking shitty laws onto good ones, sneaking in some obscure clause that gives some senator a tax break that nobody noticed or they ignore because they want the rest of the bill, a highly favorable bi-partisan bill turned into a partisan issue because a clause that furthers the interests of the party that introduced it, and inane strawman accusations that follow because now it's easy to paint someone as the bad guy that is trying to undermine this universally good bill (nevermind that their holdup is this one completely unrelated clause). The whole quid-pro-quo political economy exists because this is possible (I vote for your bill with your pet clause, and you vote for mine.) A big part of the deterioration of current state of political discourse in the US could be attributed to this one issue. I have no conception of how such a limit on the content of bills could be defined and enforced while maintaining the balance of power, but the current system is insanity.
- saosebastiao 8y agoWhat'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 8y agoAnd for long term issues like this you can wait around years until you have a favorable Congress to pass these kinds of legislation.
- hristov 8y agoThey 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 8y agoI very much doubt it's anything to do with musical aspirations and more to do with campaign contributions.
- tgamba 8y agoSo glad I live in Canada. American corporatist evil seems boundless.
- colechristensen 8y agoCanada signed the TPP which makes copyright 70 years after the death of the creator. Not exactly paradise.
- phil248 8y agoBut to be fair, those were provisions demanded by the American negotiators, and have been dropped in the updated CPTPP.
- EdTsft 8y agoCanada had those terms removed from the TPP after the US pulled out. http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2018/01/canada-successfully-stands-balanced-ip-canadian-culture-tpp-deal/ http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2018/01/canada-successfully-stand...
- vkou 8y agoWe prefer to be taken advantage by Canadian Corporatists. Kinder-Morgan, our telecom cartel, etc.
- skosch 8y agoKM is Texan actually, making the current headlines extra infurating.
- draw_down 8y agoPathetic.
- d--b 8y agoAt some point, people need to realize it's not the copyright system that's rotten, it's the incentivization of congressmen...
- contravariant 8y agoThere's no reason it has to be one or the other.
- akvadrako 8y agoBut one is the cause of the other.
- Yetanfou 8y agoThe 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.
- ddingus 8y agoA lot of it already is. I'm kind of amazed at the number of young people listening back to that time period.
- eilyra 8y agoThat makes me wonder, is there already something akin to Project Gutenberg but for music rather than books? Would be interesting to browse.
- mikekchar 8y agoI ran into this the other day: http://radio.publicdomainproject.org/ http://radio.publicdomainproject.org/
- RobertoG 8y ago>>"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 8y agoThe 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-copyright-protection-is-misguided/ https://www.wired.com/story/congress-latest-move-to-extend-c... [1] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/industries?cid=N00009869&cycle=CAREER https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/industries?c...
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoI'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.
- icebraining 8y agoCounterpoint: No, the CLASSICS Act is not a “term extension” http://www.copyhype.com/2018/05/no-the-classics-act-is-not-a-term-extension/ http://www.copyhype.com/2018/05/no-the-classics-act-is-not-a... I'm hardly a fan of copyright, but the arguments that this is not actually an extension seem sound.
- thomastjeffery 8y agoThat article is to verbose for me to really find the punchline.
- ScottBurson 8y agoHmm. 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
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- peterwwillis 8y agoCalled it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16966918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16966918
- unexistance 8y agoand apparently highly unlikely :D https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-its-not-planning-another-copyright-extension-push/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i...
- kwhitefoot 8y agoIt'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.
- csense 8y agoI'm sure this is bill sponsored by some of the finest Congressmen money can buy.
- mnm1 8y agoAs 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?