| “ |
From left to right: Becky Hogge (Open Rights Group), Erik Joseffson (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Brian McNeil (Wikinews) and Eddan Katz (EFF, right).
Becky Hogge: The legislation we are talking about is about the copyright term, as in the length of time a piece of, in this case music, remains in copyright, and in particular the term for sound recorders. Apparently the term for that in the European Union is 50 years. That means that after 50 years, sound recordings enter the public domain. That’s the body of work that includes Shakespeare, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, … the cultural heritage of human culture.”
In America the term is 95 years but in the U.K. the term is 50 years, and those in the recording industry and the performer’s union were getting together and going to the European Commission and saying ‘we would like the terms extended’. Now, in the U.K. we knew about copyright term extension. There’s a process by which governments say: ‘When this cartoon was drawn, we said that that could be in copyright for 45 years, but now it’s about to fall out of copyright, so we’ll give you another 45 years, or we’ll give you another 10 or another 20… and continually stopping those pieces of our cultural heritage from entering the public domain, along with their brothers Shakespeare, Mozart and Beethoven, like an afterlife in the public domain where we knew they could be mixed, they could be shared, and that they become a public part of our culture.
The reason why I think this is unfortunate, is because is actually, it’s very hard to see who gains from extension. Well, it’s very easy to see who gains from copyright extension on the one hand; those that are still mastering cultural iconography, you know, The Beatles back catalogue or if you are in possession of the Elvis back catalogue, or whatever it is, they’re all going to gain substantially from that. But if you think about what other sound recordings that were made at that time, all the other bits that were written, all the other plays that were written, not all of them are going to be successful 50 years after they were laid down, and it’s only a tiny minority of tracks that are going to be commercially successful.
Behind all of this info about copyright law, you need to know about the basics. Copyright law is about a balance, about a trade-off. Artists put a lot in to creating a piece of work, and once that piece has been created, in a sense, it’s very easy to replicate. So, Cliff Richard sings a song, and it’s very easy once he has sung this song, it’s laid down to be copied and copied and copied, unlike the making of a table or a shoe where you have to go back to the original creator to get a new pair. Copyright is a kind of monopoly that is granted to the creator so that they may get the revenue that they need, enough to incentivise[sic] them to make the initial work. So copyright is a trade-off between the interests of us, the public, the audience, human beings who need culture to survive and thrive, and artists who in order to make this culture need an incentive. In the law it is said that for a certain length of time, you have the rights to exploit this cultural product that has come from your loins and after that, it enters the public domain, and everyone enjoys it without restrictions.
What you’ve got at the end of the day with copyright term extension is basically … rent seeking by special interest groups lobbying governments to change the law in order that they may economically gain directly.
-Becky Hogge, Open Rights Group Executive Director (left).
Extending that term has a lot of implications. The first question that comes up is, you say: why? Are we going to incentivise Cliff Richards’ to record any more tracks in 1958? Clearly not, because it’s not 1958 any more. And then you ask yourself the second question: are you going to incentivise artists who are recording tracks now to record more tracks, because they have more incentive, because their monopoly over these neighbouring rights will be knocked up? Economists have looked at this and they say, ‘any rational act of making a decision does not look at what’s going to happen in 50 years time, let alone 95 years time, we simply don’t do this. So what you’ve got at the end of the day with copyright term extension is basically, and I hope this is not too bold, it’s basically rent seeking. It’s rent seeking by special interest groups lobbying governments to change the law in order that they may economically gain directly.
This is were you get to the sort of Cliff Richard argument with pension. Cliff Richard is a recording artist who didn’t write his own songs and will stop receiving royalty. You’ve got Cliff Richard saying ‘copyright is a pension for us’. There are artists that are saying 50 years after they’ve started their career, started recording, they’re old, they’re pensionable aged, they need their income and this royalty income is stopping. I simply don’t like that argument because every other citizen of the E.U. has contributed to their pension during their working life. This argument for me is really designed to do something very clever, which is exact sympathy from the general public for people who are already very rich. If you’re still getting royalties after 50 years, you are a very successful artist indeed.
Eddan Katz: There’s a strategy here that needs to be named, by copyright interests, major entertainment companies that have most to benefit from the extension of copyright without any incentive added; it’s a strategy to section it off, to make a story, and pinpoint one segment with that story in trying to justify an overall extension of copyright, which is particularly meant to profit and to remove works from the public domain that were set to be there. And also to really blind the pockets, and change the law in order to be able to raise the rent. It’s also being justified under harmonising; harmonising is used to justify a ratcheting up, it generally means more exclusive rights to be granted, and layered on top of existing exclusive rights. It’s not meant as harmonisation is intended to be, and as the European project is supposed to be, to find a way to create real markets. It’s not to justify the continuing increasing of exclusive rights as one specific theory about incentivising creativity when we see so much evidence that there’s a lot of creativity coming out of systems outside of long term exclusive rights.
|
” |
Audio
Unchecked
It became a hot topic after the NBGI decided to showcase the “Taiko no Tatsujin 11: Asian Version” at the 2008 Taipei Game Show, and it’s different from past series’ because the NBGI acquired several Mandarin-language songs from the Cross-Strait area (Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong) especially. When you choose them, what factors go into the decision?
