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

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

Well, Shakespeare is still commercially viable, but if that were in copyright it is vanishingly unlikely that anyone would be better off except a firm of lawyers somewhere, and everyone else would be worse off as a result. As someone said, hard cases make bad law, and I don't think that any general extension of copyright is justified by the fact that there is a case where one might wish it to be longer.

The dead ducks commercially might, in a few cases, not be dead ducks if they were in the public domain. I can see no justification for generally longer copyright after the death of the writer.

I know of no logical reasoning that says that a particular time is correct, it has to be a matter of what one thinks is vaguely fair on average. It seems to me unfair if copyright did not last for the life of the artist, and also unfair if it lasted forever. My guess at fair would be that the length of a long life OR the life of the writer or artist, whichever is the longer. Say 90 years - most people don't last that long, a few do, and a very few last to 100. To make it clear, that means that if someone published something at age 40 and died at age 80, it would go out of copyright 50 years after they died, not that it would last 90 years after they died. In some cases that may seem too short; in others far too long, but I can't see a way to make it perfect.

Of course, it would almost never happen that the life of the artist would be the limiting factor on expiry, but it would seem harsh if, exceptionally, someone who lived to 110 and needed the royalties to pay the nursing home bills had their source of income taken away. However, if life extension to unimaginable ages were developed, I might change my view about copyright lasting the life of the writer. If you live to 1000 in good health, the general culture might reasonably hope to be able to get more access to your work, under one of the GPL ideas.