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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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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(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.