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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

#41

Post by jerf »

SlimyHog wrote: post #35
loceng wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On an exponential curve, even companies would be thinking hard about renewal a few doublings into the process. Even Disney would start getting to the point where they'd be picking and choosing and not just forking over $(2^n × number of works) every year.

Also, I often advocate this, and to some extent I consider it a strategic retreat. Fine. You're a big company and you want to own your stuff forever. But behind the laws protecting those companies there's a ton of stuff that the owner doesn't care, nobody even knows who the owner is, etc. etc. (There's a lot of stuff that is de facto in the public domain because nobody owns it anymore in any practical sense, but there's no way to be sure what that stuff is, and the risk is too large to take.) The stuff the big companies are defending is just a small fraction of what exists. If we tuned the laws to give the big companies what they want (more or less) but stopped protecting everything else it'd be a win. And they can pay an increasingly steep fee for the benefit.

Or, to put it more prosaically, I don't really care how long Steamboat Willy stays under Disney's copyright, I'd like Steamboat Willy to stop shielding everything produced ever.

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

#42

Post by dahart »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31
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 a…

Personal ownership is already limited by the owner’s lifetime and automatically transfers when they die. Copyrights, on the other hand, outlive the creator.

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

#43

Post by ncallaway »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #33
loceng wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh, if the price rises enough year over year, and you dump that funding into the National Institute for the Arts, or other programs to provide grants and funding to low-income artists, I could see it being a potentially useful tool to spread the wealth around from very commercially successful works.

I'm not necessarily supporting it, but I could see some positive outcomes from the approaches.

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

#44

Post by criddell »

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?

Why would Spotify pay anybody for playing a public domain song?

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

#45

Post by 1123581321 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31
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 a…

Intellectual property can be used without depriving the original owner of its use.

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

#46

Post by kmeisthax »

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…

I disagree wholeheartedly. The purpose of copyright is to shift money made from selling copies back into the production of new works; and anything else is just blatant rent-seeking at the expense of the larger economy.

High-budget songs, movies, and video games will either make back their budgets immediately, or they will be written off as a loss. There are very few cases where a work's financial success is predicated on money made five or ten years out. Hell, for video games, ten years out and you need to port your game to a new platform, which costs money, since the industry's investment into emulation technology[0] is piss-poor.

Furthermore, the production values of a work don't have much to do with it's longevity; you can't spend twice as much to get a work with twice the relevance decades down the line. In fact, most of the works from the past that still are relevant today were made on budgets that would be considered shoe-string today. If anything, I'd argue that longer terms make cheap cash-ins a safer bet than riskier experimental projects, even though the latter is more likely to be relevant. Do you really think that, say, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is going to last longer than the original Ghostbusters?

[0] Counterexamples: PC gaming, Steam Proton, and Xbox Series/PS5 backwards compatibility. All of these rely upon having built their games on technologies with long-term compatibility support built-in (Windows, x86), or upon community re-implementation efforts (WINE). The game industry cannot ever seem to afford to write their own one-off emulators.

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

#47

Post by Mountain_Skies »

phkahler wrote: post #8

Does this offer a sort of land-grab opportunity where anyone who has an original recording can remaster it, convert to mp3, then claim copyright over that "transformation" of the original?

No but if you're big enough, you can get YouTube and other tech companies to enforce your non-existing right for you.

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

#48

Post by natechols »

ncallaway wrote: post #30
loceng wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really, one of the major issues for old and abandoned work is that it can be impossible to figure out who the rights holders are for a particular work. A step of active renewal by the rights holder would at least create a public registry of the current owner for a particular right.

This is a constant problem, publishers go out of business all the time. I have a lot of photocopied sheet music that cannot be purchased anywhere, at any price, but it will be decades before any of it can be legally shared. Just ridiculous artificial scarcity - I wonder how the composers would feel about it.

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

#49

Post by futureshock »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31
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 a…

How have I not heard this idea before? I find it a brilliant balance between capitalism and socialism. It reminds me of 99-year land leases. It’s enough ownership to pass on wealth for 1-2 generations, then it goes back into the public trust.

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

#50

Post by mediocregopher »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #31
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 a…

While I don't totally disagree, physical items add some practical issues due to their individual scarcity that digital ones don't have.

What actually happens when my car goes back into public domain? Is it just fair game for everyone? Does someone from the govmt come to pick it up? Would there be some kind of library-esque system for all public domain'd property?

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