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