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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday September 20 2018, @10:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the sudden-burst-of-sanity dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

For the last decade, the Congressional debate over copyright law has been in a stalemate. Content companies have pushed for stronger protections, but their efforts have been stopped by a coalition of technology companies and digital rights groups.

But on Tuesday, we saw a rare moment of bipartisan and trans-industry harmony on copyright law, as the Senate unanimously passed the Music Modernization Act, a bill that creates a streamlined process for online services to license music and federalizes America's bizarre patchwork of state laws governing music recorded before 1972. That will mean effectively shortening the term of protection of older music published between 1923 and 1954—under current law, these songs may not fall into the public domain until 2067.

The bill managed to get the support of several groups that are normally at each others' throats: music publishers, record labels, songwriters, major technology companies, and digital rights groups.

The bill isn't perfect, but Public Knowledge—a digital rights group that usually opposes legislation sponsored by big content companies—gave the bill its endorsement, describing it as a "significant step forward for music consumers and fans."

The Senate must now negotiate with the House, which passed its own version of the legislation earlier this year. Public Knowledge was not a fan of that legislation because it keeps pre-1972 sound recordings out of the public domain for much longer. The big question now is whether the final version of the bill will look more like the consumer-friendly Senate version or the more industry-friendly House legislation.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 20 2018, @10:37AM (8 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 20 2018, @10:37AM (#737438) Journal

    A rational copyright law would not have copyrights of multiple decades. If it did, those multiples would be small, certainly not exceeding 5.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by drussell on Thursday September 20 2018, @12:01PM (4 children)

    by drussell (2678) on Thursday September 20 2018, @12:01PM (#737454) Journal

    Indeed! I think we're off by about an order of magnitude.

    Copyright protection for this kind of media should be on the order of 10 years, not 100+ before moving into the public domain.

    Centuries of protection? This is insane. Even multiple decades seems silly.

    Some kinds of printed material, I could see, perhaps 25 years being reasonable but even that is probably pushing it in most cases. Eternal protection is certainly NOT what was originally intended and I believe is actually detrimental to the original goal. Ditto for patents. They no longer spur innovation, they hinder it, when virtually eternal protection is granted.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @12:44PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @12:44PM (#737465)

      Centuries of protection? This is insane. Even multiple decades seems silly.

      This is the result of gross abuse of the provision in the Constitution for IP protection. Specifically, the clause stating that it can exist for a "limited time." They have taken this "limited time" to mean "from now until 1 nanosecond before the heat death of the universe," to be implemented in extensions of 20 years, every 20 years.

      It's rotten to the core, and a grotesque abuse of this provision. Dangerous, too, especially when one considers how much control these companies want over your property to make sure you aren't breaking copyright.

      I half-expect this to ultimately end up a trojan horse, modified somehow or having some kind of horrible caveats that make things far worse hidden deep in some 500 page monstrosity of a bill. But if this is legit, this is the first step in anything approximating a right direction in a long, long, long time in this area.

    • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday September 20 2018, @01:55PM (1 child)

      by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Thursday September 20 2018, @01:55PM (#737485) Homepage Journal

      I don't know what Countries you're talking about. We do have some Shithole Countries. But in America our Patents last 15, or 20 years. 15 if you make something incredibly beautiful (iPad Original). Or 20 if you do the invention. Seems like an eternity in Internet Time. In regular time, it's not a lot.

      • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday September 20 2018, @06:02PM

        by Pino P (4721) on Thursday September 20 2018, @06:02PM (#737626) Journal

        The copyright in a work of authorship, such as Trump: The Art of the Deal that you chose Tony Schwartz to write for you in 1987, lasts far longer than a patent on an invention. The 20-year patent term is intended to approximate the length of a skilled craftsman's education, whereas for the past century, the international standard copyright term has been the life of the author's grandchildren [pineight.com].

    • (Score: 1) by GDX on Thursday September 20 2018, @11:03PM

      by GDX (1950) on Thursday September 20 2018, @11:03PM (#737821)

      I think that actually we need variable protection system with a period of hard protection and a period of soft protection, for the first period of hard protection that can have between 10-20 years the protection is more or less like today, during the second period of soft protection the only thing that is prevented is the commercial exploitation by 3 parties and any non commercial use is basically authorized ( receiving donatios to cover distribution costs is considered non commercial use if it never incur in economic gain ), the time duration can be even 100 years as it is also a compulsory licensing system exclusively for commercial duplication purposes ( for example someone can republish a movie that is out of print without altering the content using this system, but can't do mugs with the faces or scenes of the movie as this is outside of the scope of the compulsory licensing ).

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Whoever on Thursday September 20 2018, @04:09PM (2 children)

    by Whoever (4524) on Thursday September 20 2018, @04:09PM (#737559) Journal

    A rational copyright law would not have copyrights of multiple decades.

    Got to ensure those dead artists have an incentive to keep making music.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday September 20 2018, @05:26PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday September 20 2018, @05:26PM (#737613)

      How will the grandchildren of famous singers make it in the industry, if they have to work at MickeyD's because they parents snorted grandpa's royalties ?
      Think of the grandchildren !

    • (Score: 2) by dry on Saturday September 22 2018, @05:42AM

      by dry (223) on Saturday September 22 2018, @05:42AM (#738483) Journal

      Well Prince released a new album today I believe and will keep releasing for a long time, so it obviously works.