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It's election season in the UK, and the Green Party's policy document has been coming under scrutiny recently. In it is a desire to reduce copyright term to 14 years (not life + 14 years, but 14 years from publication).
Unsurprisingly, this has received a bit of a backlash from various parties.
There's no chance the Green Party will form the next government, so this is all academic, but is this a sensible idea? Are people overreacting?
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UK Green Party Proposes 14-year Copyright Term - Artists are not Amused
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday April 24 2015, @02:32PM
I'm really surprised at this. Most creative works (film, books, music) have a large spike of initial income. The numbers I saw a few years ago showed that, for most works, more than half of the income comes within the first 18 months, more than half of the rest within the next 18 months. Reducing copyright to 3 years would therefore only reduce income by 25%. Reducing it to 14 years would primarily affect the incomes of people who produce one work that is largely unknown for a long time, and those who are raking it in to such a degree that they could quite happily stop getting anything well before the 14 years is up and still never have to work another day to afford a lavish lifestyle.
I've also seen it argued that shorter copyrights also help authors because they increase the value of new works to publishers. When 14-year copyrights were proposed to a panel of science fiction authors a few years ago, they were roundly criticised: they wanted 7, at most.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kell on Friday April 24 2015, @03:03PM
The problem is the mindset of corporate executives, which can be roughly summarised as "Keep it like the Kaiser". In fairness, they don't want to see any asset (even abstract ones like copyright IP) devalued - doesn't look good on the quarterly spreadsheet. However, it's really representative of short-term thinking and putting their own paychecks ahead of everyone else.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Friday April 24 2015, @03:51PM
Ideas like the Long Tail encourage holding on to rights for the longest time possible to ensure every penny is squeezed out of them.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @04:25PM
The "Long Tail" doesn't mean long as in time, but rather a statistical tail in the sense of stocking a broad inventory where the large number of low sales volume items add up to a significant amount compared to the small number of best-sellers. The "Long Tail" doesn't necessarily encourage any particular copyright policy as far as I understand it, just that there is profit to be had in not focusing too heavily.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday April 24 2015, @05:08PM
Not necessarily - the long tail refers to pretty much all relatively unpopular product. Yes, there's a lot of stuff that never had more than fringe appeal, but there's also a lot of oldies that are still generating a trickle of profit. Switch to a 14 year copyright term and you'd pretty much destroy the market for the "Complete works of The Beatles - 60th anniversary compendium", everyone interested would have already downloaded all the songs anyway.
(Score: 3, Informative) by wantkitteh on Friday April 24 2015, @11:24PM
Of course the Long Tail is referring to time - those broad inventories you refer to are, in practice, back-catalogues. Copyright extensions protect the size of those catalogues, albeit at the expense of the public domain.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday April 24 2015, @03:16PM
The problem here is that these artists are seeing their work in much the same way American working and middle class see wealth. They're sure that their work is going to be a sleeper hit soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @03:19PM
Hollywood films, video games, "club" pop music singles, and some non-fiction books (e.g. biographies of celebs) certainly make most of their money within a couple years, or five at most. That's because they're targeting a mass audience. For films and science fiction, a lot of the appeal is giving their target audience something to talk about with friends, coworkers, and dates (or conventioneers for the sci fi crowd :-).
Conversely, if you don't see that hit film, you might be left out of part of a conversation.
Serious fiction, classical and jazz music, and many non-fiction books generally don't follow this sales trend though. They can make slow but steady sales for decades; some works of fiction are entirely unknown until they are somehow "discovered" many years after publication and become best-sellers, even after the author's death.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by snick on Friday April 24 2015, @03:35PM
It is all about maintaining scarcity.
If everything over 14 years old were in the public domain, then someone could open a "FreeFlix" or "FreeTunes" or "FreePub" site, that only hosted PD content, paid no royalties to anyone, and still had an amazing catalog to choose from.
The studios/labels/publishing houses don't want to have to compete against their own back catalog.
(Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Friday April 24 2015, @05:08PM
So how about make it ten years and let them renew 7 times. If it's not renewed, it becomes public domain. It gives them 80 years if they're still in business and still interested. It gives abandonware legal standing in the public domain. It's win-win.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 24 2015, @05:27PM
That only works if DRM is prohibited. If copyright is limited in that way, and DRM is legal, then they can sell things that only work as long as the seller keeps a "token" site running...and you can only play the work if you've got an internet connection and the seller's "token" site is running. Some games have already done this, and become unusable while those that bought them are still playing.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday April 24 2015, @06:06PM
The only real rule of copyright law at this point seems to be: "Thou shalt not allow Mickey Mouse to pass into the public domain".
To provide a bit of a story of how ridiculous the current copyright regime is: My grandfather was a musician. Mostly because of my grandfather's folk song collection work, my family gets a fairly small check once a year, even though he died 35 years ago (we send the money to a charity in the area where he collected the songs) and he did most of his work over 50 years ago. As for why we don't release his work into the public domain, if we release our claim on it, all that happens is that ASCAP gets what we were getting.
And of course all the focus on the money of copyright ignores the other motivations for doing artistic work. For example, I have to think that granddad got a bit of gratification because one of the songs he collected became a hit for Lonnie Donegan, and also was the first recording ever made by a couple of nobodies named Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
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(Score: 1) by Rickter on Friday April 24 2015, @08:16PM
I think we need a tiered IP structure:
7 years for initial copyright, possibly with significant renewal fees for a few years of extension, say 1% of total revenue (cumulative) /year. So your blockbuster movie that makes $300M domestic box office and other pay per view and DVD sales? $3M to renew for year 8. If you don't foresee more profit than that, then you don't renew. The fee for year 9 goes up by the amount of the sales from that year.
30 years of format shifting control, So if you write a book or video game, you should have a significant amount of time to sell the rights to a studio who would make a movie out of it, and have time to create the work, but if they fail, you still have enough control to hire another company. (We don't want a five year window, where Universal Studios makes a movie with your OK, but then delays releasing until 5 years and week after publication, then publishes the movie under fair use and gives the writer no profits, and has a jump on all of the other studios due to their agreement with the author.)
30 years of derivative/sequel work limit: So, only George Lucas/Lucas Arts/Disney could create a for profit movie in the Star Wars universe for 30 years, until 2007, then anybody could create Star Wars movies. So, nobody could create a Mickey Mouse work for 30 years from first usage. (You couldn't extend this forever, or nobody will ever get to make derivative works, which is what we are trying to get away from.) Beyond that time, works that are not done with the permission of the original author and most recent rights holder, must clearly state that they are not associated with the original authors, so customers don't blame the original creator for crappy work done by the derivatives. So you could have several groups working on Star Wars derivative movies, books, and games, competing with each other, and the ones that give the best deal to artists & actors probably will make the best movies, and get the most business. They would only enjoy the 7 year copyright limit for each work.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday April 25 2015, @01:18PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Friday April 24 2015, @11:05PM
The studios/labels/publishing houses don't want to have to compete against their own back catalog.
And for good reason! Everything they come out with now is complete crap!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday April 24 2015, @04:38PM
The science fiction authors have most likely read Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants [spiderrobinson.com]" (Audio version, MP3 format [libsyn.com] if you don't want to get caught reading fiction at work). It makes wonderful points about the difficulties that accompany the path of infinite extension of copyright that we seem to be going down. Personally, I think that the entire story should be read, aloud, in chambers, with attendance required, before ANY vote is taken on altering copyright.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Saturday April 25 2015, @03:14AM
Thank you so very much for that link! I found the story itself to be quite thought-provoking and am downloading the MP3 even as I right this. I concur with your assessment that this should be mandatory reading prior to any vote being taken on altering copyright.
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(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday April 24 2015, @05:43PM
Reducing copyright to 3 years would therefore only reduce income by 25%. Reducing it to 14 years would primarily affect the incomes of people who produce one work that is largely unknown for a long time,
Probably true for things like books and music.
But 3 years might also affect the follow-on things, like movies made from books.
I could see something Harry Potter first book made into a Movie before the second book was even finished by people not associated with the author, That might seem a little unfair when you thin about it.
But 14 years would probably handle that.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2015, @06:03PM
Someone uses their own resources to produce a product is not unfair.