Thanks to Harry Metcalfe for alerting Geeklawyer to the news, greeted with weary ennui, that Parliament is thinking of yielding to the special interest groups and uber rich lobbying power of the music cartel. Despite Gower saying that extending the mechanical copyright term from 50 to 70 years was unjustified on economic grounds the vacuous MPs thought the real issue was morality.
While there is some limited legal basis for taking morals as a basis for a policy position it is very limited indeed, and mostly imported from the alien civil conceptions of France: things to do with attribution defamatory treatment etc etc.
The parliamentary group, argued primarily for consistency of the term of protection: if a composer was entitled to life + 70 years why shouldn’t a performer? If normalisation of copyright term is the policy objective one presumes that the term of other rights will need to be looked at. For example does the 25 year term for protection of a published edition need extending to life + 70 on the same basis that there is no argument for a distinction? or the 50 years of a cable-cast right?
Indeed if one is talking of morality perhaps the argument should be reversed: is there any reason why an author should get greater term protection than a performer - perhaps life+70 should be dropped to 50 years?
Indeed if ‘morality’ is the issue why not make it a perpetual right?
At its heart is the fundamental question: “why is property in intellectual creations not the same as for any other property - like the property in a physical object like a house?” A good and much broader question which I shall pose and then spinelessly abandon to another day…
That phrase...
What’s even more interesting is that Mr. Gower said in an interview with OUT-LAW that the economic data he saw even supported reducing the 50 year term, but that political realities prevented him from recommending this:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070430-gowers-i-took-the-politically-prudent-course-on-copyright-in-ip-report.html
And now the bastards are up for extending it anyway, using the good old excuse of “harmonisation”. I bet none of them even read Gower’s IP Review, even though the the current government were the very ones who commissioned it. I guess it was just a token effort to appease the proletariat when they never had any intention of paying any attention to it.
What annoys the hell out of me is that the public domain practically doesn’t exist any more, with copyrights being extended to the point where once material is actually released it’s no longer culturally relevant, entirely defeating the point of the creation of a “copy right” in the first place. (Which was, in my opinion, to encourage the creation of works by providing an artificial monopoly, but making sure that society as a whole would benefit from these works after the creator had time to derive a significant income from them.)
Oh, to have it revert to 14 years + an optional 14 year extension, which is how copyright originally operated when it was created in the Statue of Anne. You can read it here:
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/eurodocs/anne_1710.htm
More history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
P.S. GeekLawyer, why does your comment system require Javascript to be enabled to add a comment? That’s rubbish, please fix it.
An interesting comment on this very subject can be found on this ‘ere blog.
http://xrrf.blogspot.com/2007/05/bpi-mtv-please-them-please-them.html
Mark
Eik,
Rousseau would be turning in his grave at this notion of ownership of ideas.
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