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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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Make it right before you make it faster.
(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.