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All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

publicdomainreview.org

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Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#31

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

marcodiego wrote: post #2

99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.

I think if we're going to time limit ownership rights to intellectual property we should time limit ownership rights to everything - including land, buildings, shares and stocks, bonds, art collections, all of it. Except maybe trivial items like home furnishings and portable tools.

I've yet to hear any credible argument - one that doesn't reduce to entitlement and wishful thinking - for distinguishing between these asset classes.

If IP is effectively a public good held on a short lease, so is all property. If it isn't, it isn't. Any argument you can make about the benefits of putting intellectual work in the public domain, you can also make - more convincingly - about land and any other productive resource.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#32

Post by mikepurvis »

foolfoolz wrote: post #19
marcodiego wrote: post #2

99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.

i think this is fair and we will likely see it extended further. the media works of today cost way more than they did before. some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds of millions. some video games billions of dollars. and the longevity of media has increased over time. we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies from the 50s and 60s. and i think recent movies will last even longer since…

Okay, but for all modern media at those price tags, the overwhelming majority of the revenue is seen within the first year, often within the first month or even first few days (consider pre-orders on video games— RDR2 reportedly made $725M in its first weekend).

Why should this content be locked up for decades past the point where it has already made 90% of the money it's ever going to make? So the Disney company can have a century's worth of exclusive material ready to go when they launch D+, creating an absolutely impenetrable barrier to entry for an upstart?

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#33

Post by toomuchtodo »

loceng wrote: post #25
ncallaway wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Copyright Act of 14 years, with an option to extend an additional 14 years, seems reasonable to me.

I've liked the suggestion of an increasing annual cost, perhaps double, every year past a certain baseline - so if the work is valuable enough, productive financially, then the owners can afford to retain/maintain full control over it.

This is just extending the rent seeking. If the work is so valuable the owner can continue to extend their copyright, the public should receive that value after the 14 years (by which point, the owner has been made whole through collecting rents for those 14 years) versus the owner ratcheting up the cost to pay to maintain the copyright monopoly on the work in question.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#34

Post by criddell »

foolfoolz wrote: post #19
marcodiego wrote: post #2

99 years to enter public domain... I don't think this is fair.

i think this is fair and we will likely see it extended further. the media works of today cost way more than they did before. some songs cost millions to produce. some movies hundreds of millions. some video games billions of dollars. and the longevity of media has increased over time. we may not watch much 1920s movies but we do watch movies from the 50s and 60s. and i think recent movies will last even longer since…

> some songs cost millions to produce

Nobody is investing millions in a song that they think could take 95 years to earn enough to justify the investment.

Copyright is there to incentivize creating new works. If the copyright was shortened to max(life of the artist, 50 years), how many artists do you think would stop creating?

Frankly, there's an argument to be made that shortening the length of copyright to 25 years would encourage more new works simply because you can rest an your laurels.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#35

Post by SlimyHog »

loceng wrote: post #25
ncallaway wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Copyright Act of 14 years, with an option to extend an additional 14 years, seems reasonable to me.

I've liked the suggestion of an increasing annual cost, perhaps double, every year past a certain baseline - so if the work is valuable enough, productive financially, then the owners can afford to retain/maintain full control over it.

This would just mean that rich companies/people will get to keep the copyright and others do not. We're in this whole situation where things don't enter the public domain for 100 years because of Disney's lobbying.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#36

Post by siver_john »

keeglin wrote: post #12
mattl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is reasonable? 14? 24? 50?

I was going to go with 10 years. I mean, nobody cared about Madonna's "Ray Of Light" beyond 1999. On the other hand, artists - like Dolly Parton - have made long careers out of songwriting that have carried them into their senior years, so it's a balance. Clearly 99 years is absurd. Maybe 20 years is the balance to strike. Dolly would still be doing just fine with that term.

As the patron saint of my state, I'd also point out that she has used the money from her music to invest in other things. She is quite a shrewd business woman and I think even with 10 years she would have been fine.

Though I think 20 years is reasonable enough.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#37

Post by _jal »

ncallaway wrote: post #9
mattl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is reasonable? 14? 24? 50?

The original Copyright Act of 14 years, with an option to extend an additional 14 years, seems reasonable to me.

I can see scaling it by change in life expectancy, to keep the bargain roughly the same.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#38

Post by mattl »

mnsc wrote: post #20
mattl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. New Order are still making good money from Blue Monday from 1983, and clearly there’s a lot of interest in The Beatles still. Maybe a shorter period of time with an option to extend it like a snooze feature on an alarm clock.

But does having a work enter public domain automatically mean that eg New Order will stop getting paid for streams via legitimate services like Spotify?

That’s something that’s probably not been figured out yet. Probably won’t be figured out until popular stuff from the 50s and 60s starts hitting PD.

Re: All sound recordings prior to 1923 will enter the US public domain in 2022

#40

Post by criddell »

dahart wrote: post #28
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 10 years. We are moving at breakneck speed in just about every corner, but copyright protections. A decade is forever in today's world.

Is 10 years enough protection for the source code of a startup? Sometimes it takes longer than that to break even… All law moves slowly. The law is supposed to move slowly, that’s (mostly) a feature, not a bug. You don’t want the existing laws to change every year, driving would be more of a nightmare than it already is. Copyright was originally about protecting a creator’s ability to make some money from their works…

But think of all the businesses that might be built on the work of the original business that never took off. What we are trying to maximize is overall benefit to society, so we grant a monopoly to a creator for a limited term to incentivize new work.

Ten years may or may not be too short. How often does ten year old software make the difference for a company taking off this year?

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