Intellectual prorpety and copyright

[king_pellinor]

Splitting this off from LadyofAstolat's journal, as it;'s not really on topic there and she said she didn't want to get into it too much:

I see that there's a motion (presumably an Early-Day Motion) in Parliament which says:

"This House notes that 50 years ago Lonnie Donegan's Cumberland Gap was No. 1 in the charts for five weeks; is concerned that due to the present law governing payments for use of audio recordings this track will go out of copyright at the end of 2007 and that the family of Lonnie Donegan, who would have been 76 on 29 April, and the other performers will no longer receive any royalties, nor have any say in how this recording is used".

My response would be:

"I note that 50 years ago Lonnie Donegan's Cumberland Gap was No. 1 in the charts for five weeks; I am concerned that due to the present law governing payments for use of audio recordings this track will not go out of copyright until the end of 2007 and so even now the general public is unable to sing this song freely without getting permission, notwithstanding that Donegan himself is actually dead."

Let songs go into the public domain. If they're only sung by people at parties, or played as soundtracks to what are effectively historical documentaries, then they're not commercial any more. Stop treating them as if they are!

Do you know how many songs can't be sung freely because Cliff Richard owns the copyright? Neither do I, because they're dead ducks commercially and so no-one's paying attention any more!

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Curses! LJ ate my comment, even though I put it on the clipboard! Let's see if I can reproduce it.

I think that books are different from songs. A novel is a story told in exactly chosen words. Copyright covers the exact reproduction of those words. (It is a lot more fuzzy on fanfic (i.e. taking characters or situations created by the author, and exploring them in your own way.) It certainly doesn't cover someone recounting the whole plot of the novel to their friend.)

Songs have a sort of double existence, at least with today's pop music. There is the song itself (a line of melody with attached words), and there is the specific recording of that song, complete with arrangement etc. Should a different law cover someone using an actual recording without permission, and someone interpreting the song in their own way, singing it with two friends in a pub? Unlike novels, songs positively invite people to interpret them in their own way. You can learn a song in minutes, and sing it in the shower; you can't do the same to novels. People do cover versions of songs, but you don't get cover versions of novels. A novel just is; a song is much more fluid.

I think there is a good argument for having a much looser concept on intellectual property over the song itself, than over the specific recording. After all, who are we hurting if we sit in a pub and sing Cumberland Gap? If anything, we're providing a free advert for the song, and encouraging people present to go out and buy a "best of Lonnie Donnegan" album. We've bought a good few CDs purely because they contain songs we've previously heard sung during informal singarounds.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

PRS, of course, work on the basis that we are hurting Lonnie Donegan. For every person who thinks "Gosh, I'd have bought a copy of that but I don't need to now because I can hear it being sung in the pub", Lonnie Donegan loses out because his shade has to see his relatives go without the royalties they would otherwise have received.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

They seem to be very stupid. They seem to work very differently from everyone else in marketing, advertising etc. Everyone else works on the assumption that publicity is good; exposure is good. If someone creates a musical jingle for their product, and hear children singing it in the playground, they think "Great! Job done!" They don't think "Nooo!!! It's infringing my copyright." Companies pay lots of money to get their brand of breakfast cereal featured in the background in a movie. The music industry wants the movie to pay them for the privilege of using their song. The cereal manufacturers know that having their product used in a film will boost sales, but the music people don't seem to have realised this rather obvious fact.

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Yup, they are completely stupid. Copyright protection is way too long and way too all-embracing. I am also not even convinced that intellectual property in general is a good thing -- I once read a rather striking article about how 19th century Germany (I think, or was it Switzerland?) became a hothouse of innovation precisely BECAUSE there was no IP protection, and so all these ideas were free to bounce around and inspire people, instead of being locked up in one company.

Neuromancer

[rustica.livejournal.com]

Iawtc. It's a complex subject and, like you, I'm not prepared to say it's a *bad* thing, certainly not in all situations, though neither am I convinced it's always good. I think that there has to be a balance between remunerating an author/artist/whatever, and the recognition that their output passes into public culture and at some point into public ownership. I definitely don't think that copyright should be extended. If someone's had 50 or 75 years of royalties from something, that really should be enough. For heavens sake! They knew these were the terms at the beginning.

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

If someone's had 50 or 75 years of royalties from something, that really should be enough. Quite right!

Although slightly off topic, patents give me cause for concern, and I would be very unhappy if the term of patents were to be extended. Already companies with large teams of lawyers are patenting obvious things that people have been doing for years, and nobody (other than another large company) can afford to fight them.

At least this abuse of the patent system, worse in the USA than the UK (so far) has a time limit, and as yet nobody believes that they can patent the exact same thing that has already been patented before. I mean, can you imagine the lack of development of technology if a substantial royalty had to be paid to a firm of lawyers for every use of the wheel? OTOH maybe we would have had antigravity now because of the problems that introduced!

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

I think this is taking things a little too far the other way. No protection at all makes it really easy to be creative and innovative, but it does reduce the incentive to be so. Why should I write a book if someone else can get the money for publishing it?