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Topic: Question about vinyl rips. (Read 36437 times) previous topic - next topic
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Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #25
I haven't heard if there is any debate
You sound like you know more about this than I do, but I don't think Statutory Instruments need to be debated.

I admit, I only sound like I know stuff. Parliament's website explains:

Quote
There are two types of Statutory Instrument (SI):
  • Affirmative instruments: Both Houses of Parliament must expressly approve them
  • Negative instruments: become law without a debate or a vote but may be annulled by a resolution of either House of Parliament
In both cases, Parliaments room for manoeuvre is limited. Parliament can accept or reject an SI but cannot amend it.


I also get the impression they are more the realm of specific committees.

The copyright reform SIs are the affirmative type. The list of SIs in the House of Commons shows the SIs in question as having been presented for approval (or rejection) on 27 March. If approved, they'll move to one of the other lists on that page, and will have an "approved" date shown. I wasn't able to find a similar list for the House of Lords; it seems this is the only list there is, so you tell me what that means.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #26
With respect. I think you are missing the point Doug.

Of course it is possible to dream up circumstances where one might sympathise with the victims of extreme circumstance.
I'm not sure why death should come in to it. I think 50 years for identifiable artistic input (composing, playing, singing etc) and 25 years for identifiable technical input (remastering, restoring etc - currently generally uncopyrightable, but it doesn't stop people trying) from the date of creation would be more than enough.

Because the conversation is funded by rights holders, people miss the genuine creative and financial value of the public domain. I found yet another plus point for it in a report yesterday, which looks at the pitifully poor survival rates for silent films...

http://www.loc.gov/film/pdfs/pub158.final_...n_sept_2013.pdf

Quote
As the original 28-year copyright term expired for many silent
films, distributors began offering 16 and 8mm prints for sale to
schools, libraries, and private collectors. These companies would
select (and by copying, preserve) only the titles in the public domain.
When offered old nitrate prints for potential distribution, the first
action for nontheatrical distributor Blackhawk Films was to check
the copyright status. According to Blackhawk’s company policy,
“[We] hold up any attempt to copy or announce for release
until we have the report back from the Copyright Office
indicating that the word is ‘no renewal found.’ Then, and
only then, do we get to work and make the conversion.”
The company made 16mm negatives for its purposes, and
passed the nitrate to archives.

The public domain status of some films has encouraged their
survival.
The United States copyright on most studio silent features
was renewed. The copyright on almost all independent films expired,
as for the most part, their producers were no longer in business
and there was no one to file the renewal.

Copyright protection should have increased the economic incentive
of a studio to preserve its silent films, but MGM was the only
company to do so as a matter of policy. Copyright could not have
been MGM’s primary motivation, as the studio also preserved at least
43 features to which the studio’s rights had expired and the
company had no ownership. And valid copyrights were not
sufficient to encourage other studio rights-holders to invest
in their silent libraries.

Some small producers, such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary
Pickford, and Harold Lloyd, owned the films in which they
starred. They preserved their films regardless of copyright
status. The public domain status of films produced by independent
companies (such as the films Cecil B. DeMille
produced at his own studio) led to their acquisition by
entrepreneurs who preserved them in the course of commercial
exploitation. In 1956 television distributor Paul
Killiam bought the negative to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Road
to Yesterday (1925) after the film fell into the public domain
and preserved it. Nontheatrical distributor Blackhawk
Films preserved dozens of features and hundreds of short
films in the public domain.


Far more silent films were preserved outside of the studio that originally made the film than by that studio (with the exception of MGM).

It was the (compared to today) short copyright term that preserved many of these films. Had they remained in copyright, even more would have been left to rot.

Don't think for one second that this doesn't and won't apply to audio, even now. Go beyond the mainstream, and it's amazing how much material only becomes available either just before it falls out of copyright (from the original owner), or just after (from someone else). Extending copyright to delay it entering the public domain just locks it in the vaults, where at best it's preserved properly (even though no one gets to hear it), and at worst it rots or is destroyed.

Cheers,
David.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #27
There is a book by Lee Marshall: "Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry" (2005). Likely based on his 2001 thesis, http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3068/1/WRAP_THES...rshall_2001.pdf . This is sociology, not law, but the round-up on legal status in chapter 8 is fascinating.
It's all fascinating, thank you. The record company stance: it's all about money (of course), but we daren't say that so we'll pretend we care about the artists.

Cheers,
David.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #28
Well if we're going to hijack this thread to rant and rave...

Much like publishers, the record companies will insist to their (and our) graves that they don't want or need any unsolicited "preservation assistance" from the general public, Google, or anyone else. Legally, it is these companies' prerogative to hold their master recordings for ransom for as long as possible, only reissuing in dribs and drabs what they think there's a worthwhile market for, in whatever the format and mastering standard du jour is. If that means obscure recordings and our preferred masterings languish unreissued, and unprotected master tapes walk out the door or deteriorate beyond usability, so be it. They don't care about preserving culture or nobly securing the benefits of the public domain. They want their goddamned money, as much of it as possible, in perpetuity, so our only responsibility is to be good little consumers, following the laws they wrote for us and handing over the cash for new product. Digitally ripping or trading old vinyl on our hard drives is akin to buying secondhand CDs, stealing food from the mouths of starving artists, in their view.

Of course I don't sympathize. I wouldn't blame anyone if they simply set their reservations aside and disregarded the letter of the law, in those countries where it's not legal to rip whatever you want. But I'd also understand if some here feel strongly that the law should be followed.

In the U.S., a 1990s "home taping" law allows the public to make analog copies of anything, but only allows digital copies to be made when using digital "recording" media & devices which carry a levy paid to the RIAA. Very few devices & media qualify. It's mainly just DAT and "audio" CD-R. Hard drives, smartphones, iPods, and general-purpose CD/DVD/BD burners are not in this category, so ripping vinyl to your hard drive remains illegal...unless the audio on the vinyl is public domain, of course.

So I will be firing up my standalone CD recorder now, recording the vinyl playback straight to a special Audio CD-R, and not using my computer at all. That's how I always do it. Don't you?

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #29
Well, the other way round, some people who transfer their records or cassettes to PC or on a CD claim that it's perfectly OK to download a release they own on any of these old media from a warez forum or a torrent, as long as they already paid for it in the past. A number of them prefer to do it if they have the opportunity since they avoid any hassle with recording and cleaning the audio and last but not least they get the recording of better quality.
However, if you think of that, it may not seem absolutely OK, just because they obtain better quality than that they paid for. Let's take an example, in the 90's and early 2000's you had a choice to buy a CD for 25$ or a cassette for 15$ of many albums on the market. Would it feel good if you bought the cheaper cassette and then downloaded a lossless rip of the CD from the internet? Probably not.
Even today, many download shops offer customers the right to choose which quality they would like to buy, e.g. MP3 or MP4 in different bitrates: 192 kbps, 256 kbps, 320 kbps; lossless files WAVE/FLAC or even studio masters (24bit/96kHz, 24bit/88.2kHz) etc., of course, again, the higher quality the higher price. That may be compared with the previous CD vs cassette example. If you downloaded the cheapest 192 kbps mp3 quality from the shop, you probably could not say you legally own a studio master quality recording which you downloaded from a one-click host or a torrent.
Concerning this case, when vinyl has a different mastering, and a person owning a CD release downloads a needledrop, I agree with the person who's mentioned that the engineer who was envolved in production of the vinyl master deserves to be paid for their job, but this way it might not reach them.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #30
I'm not sure why death should come in to it.


x years after death means that the rights are fully "owned" by the originator, but only to a limited extent inheritable. There is a sense to it.

I guess that there are other rights that could work quite a bit the same way. E.g. in a jurisdiction where you can sue over slander, it might very well be that the law could allow you to sue me over claims that your late father was pedobear incarnated, yet dismiss you when you want to sue over finding an ancestor on a list of people attending Emperor Caligula's underage orgies. (Of course the Roman coin you inherited through a line of (great)^n-grandfathers is still yours.)


I guess breaking certain traffic rules will count as "common practice", and ... people still understand that it is not a good idea to abolish them.
Could you give an example, please? Does a vast majority of car drivers really do that?


Never ever hit 51 when speed limit is 50? Never ever forgotten to signal a lane change? Never ever crossed an orange traffic light? Never ever had - or deserved - a parking ticket? I see people doing that more or less every day. (And ... I have been driving around two months with only one bulb lighting up my back plate. Ah, that makes me a true outlaw, now I'm heading out to the internet to download a bootleg.)

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #31
some people who transfer their records or cassettes to PC or on a CD claim that it's perfectly OK to download a release they own on any of these old media from a warez forum or a torrent, as long as they already paid for it in the past. A number of them prefer to do it if they have the opportunity since they avoid any hassle with recording and cleaning the audio and last but not least they get the recording of better quality.


Let me disregard your example of paying for the lossy but downloading the lossless, and rather take as example: you buy a CD or an LP, and then you download a rip of the very same. (To confess to a particular case myself: I once corrupted a FLAC file, track 1 of a CD rip of mine, and rather than digging up the CD from deep down somewhere (I still own it!) I pirated it, fixed this image's offset to get tracks 2 etc. bit-identical to mine, extracted track 1, checked that the CRC matched my rip log, transferred tags from my corrupted file and replaced it.  Quite a lot of work for one track I have hardly listened to, but I was annoyed.  Now that was maybe an odd case?)

To the arguments:
On one hand it sounds reasonable to say that well, I would rip the CD so I don't obtain anything I wouldn't have - the file is a near-perfect substitute to something I already have, nobody loses anything. But then on the other hand, if you do buy an LP mainly as a collector's item, much like a piece of merchandise, then that is not necessarily a perfect substitute - you might have been streaming the same music rather than taking the effort of ripping from the LP. Quite a bit of the streaming market would be music that people could play from their own copies - but still stream it. That is the convenience of accessibility, and that is a good people pay for (or a good people visit piratesite.com to obtain!). So in this sense, downloading an LP rip to save you the work of ripping it, that snatches the very same service that you might want to obtain from e.g. Spotify.

On the other hand, what if you have already paid your Spotify subscription? Well then it still affects someone's per-listen royalties. And downloading could push the prices on streaming services - I guess it has, but I would assume that LP buyers who might not even buy the LP if they didn't "bundle it" with an illegal download, is a very small part of that. If reality is - although anyone could claim that, and even wrongly believe so  - that you would not buy the LP couldn't you download the rip (then you would have stuck to streaming, which could be less profitable than the LP) then there aren't much losses to argue over.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #32
To return to the OP's original question, no one but the uploader put any work into the DIY digitization of the LP, which is likely out of print anyway, so there's really no one to compensate. The OP has already paid the artist and the music company by buying the CD (which he still owns), so who is hurt?

I think companies like MFSL are missing a business opportunity by not offering their own needledrops of OOP LPs (labeled as such) to the public for a reasonable price. The physical disc will still retain its eBay value, and people who would never be able to buy a copy could enjoy the wonderful work MFSL put into the project. I realize the contractual issues would be an obstacle, but the artist and the music company could collect (yet another) few bucks for the album sale.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #33
I'm not sure why death should come in to it.


x years after death means that the rights are fully "owned" by the originator, but only to a limited extent inheritable. There is a sense to it.
Well, yes, I see what they're doing. I just find it perverse that a musical composition has one protection (life+70), a recording of a performance has another (was 50, now 70), and an invention has another (20). The different separation (or not) of money vs moral rights is also strange.

Quote
I guess that there are other rights that could work quite a bit the same way. E.g. in a jurisdiction where you can sue over slander, it might very well be that the law could allow you to sue me over claims that your late father was pedobear incarnated, yet dismiss you when you want to sue over finding an ancestor on a list of people attending Emperor Caligula's underage orgies. (Of course the Roman coin you inherited through a line of (great)^n-grandfathers is still yours.)
You can make that argument. It's not a bad one.

The argument that life matters for composition, but not for performance or invention, and in a monetary rather than just moral sense, is what I find hard to accept. If life does matter, then I can see the point in a short post-date (because it removes the incentive to bump-off an author), but 70 years?!


In truth, we have the situation because the industry has lobbied for it, and no one has lobbied against it. There are people who would love patents to last for life+70 years too, but any country that enacted that would send their industry back into the 19th century.

Cheers,
David.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #34
To reply to the original question: depending on where you live, I'd say there is a 90% chance it's not legal, but it differs per country.

I'm not sure why death should come in to it. I think 50 years for identifiable artistic input (composing, playing, singing etc) and 25 years for identifiable technical input (remastering, restoring etc - currently generally uncopyrightable, but it doesn't stop people trying) from the date of creation would be more than enough.

Let's look at it from the other way: why limit it at all? Well, from a practical point of view, at some point it no longer possible to maintain. But still: someone made something. It has been released to the public. Because works like these (books, music, video other forms of art) are easy to copy, there is a certain protection granted by the law. Why is this protection granted limited at all?

So my question: why do you think 50/25 years is enough? Not to be rude or to be taken personal, but the only reason I see people giving for limiting copyright is 'selfish', like "so I can have it for free" or more disguised like "so some artist can use it for free to create a derivative work". Is there any fundamental reason why copyright should be limited to a certain timespan, aside from whether it is possible to maintain such rules and granted there are some fair use policies like being able to copy a rightfully obtained copy for personal use? It is very different from patents for example, because copyright protects creative expressions, while patents protects tools. A tool is universal, such a creative expression is not.

Sure, I'd like to see a much shorter copyright term so I download old recordings for free, or make recordings of works by certain composers without having to worry whether copyright has already expired in Mexico or something. But that's all quite selfish. I can clearly see the reason for copyright protection, I cannot see the reason to limit the term.

edit: to differentiate copyright and patents further, think of what a patent would do in music. For example, I can make a piece of music in a 5-beat measure.(5-beat measures give a sense of doom or eeriness) That piece of music is protected, if you make something with exactly the same notes in that 5-beat pattern, you're violating my copyright. Now, if I'd patent 5-beat measure, stating that I found that the human psyche reacts to 5-beat measures with an emotion of fear, which is useful for film soundtracks, you can't use a 5-beat measure in your music without my permission. That's the difference: copyright protects a certain expression or performance, while patents protect the tools to do these things.
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #35
So my question: why do you think 50/25 years is enough? Not to be rude or to be taken personal, but the only reason I see people giving for limiting copyright is 'selfish', like "so I can have it for free" or more disguised like "so some artist can use it for free to create a derivative work". Is there any fundamental reason why copyright should be limited to a certain timespan, aside from whether it is possible to maintain such rules and granted there are some fair use policies like being able to copy a rightfully obtained copy for personal use? It is very different from patents for example, because copyright protects creative expressions, while patents protects tools. A tool is universal, such a creative expression is not.


As long as you do not accept the patent analogy, I guess the null hypothesis would be a limit of 0 years, 0 days, 0 seconds. What needs to be argued against, is the following principle: I see a nice garden, I lay out my own garden the same way; I see a nice piece of clothing, I sew myself a nice piece of clothing; I see Mona Lisa, I draw a copy of Mona Lisa; I see a mathematical formula used to encrypt files, I copy that mathematical formula to encrypt my files; I hear My Way, I sing My Way; I hear a particular recording of My Way, I make myself a copy of that one.
I am not taking anyone else's copy, so I am not stealing from anyone. And I am not pretending my copy is the original one (nor that I am the one who originated it) - there is a good reason to give you the exclusive right to "pose as yourself" in public, but not the same reason to interfere with my singing in the shower as long as my walls keep the noise inside.

If OTOH you do accept the patent analogy: whoever brings something new to the table should be granted the right to eat from it it first - then we are talking.
(Why should patents expire any more than the monopoly on distributing old words put in a particular order?)


Patentability is also jurisdiction-dependent, BTW.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #36
I am not taking anyone else's copy, so I am not stealing from anyone.

Sure, but that's not the problem here. Copyright (as the name says) is a restriction on copying something. You didn't steal, you copied, which isn't legal too. It's like saying "yeah, I didn't take their car, it's still their car, I'm not stealing from anyone" when you just set a car on fire. Sure, you aren't stealing, but that isn't the problem, the problem is setting fire to it.

As long as you do not accept the patent analogy, I guess the null hypothesis would be a limit of 0 years, 0 days, 0 seconds.

That is like saying: if you don't accept that stealing a car is similar to setting fire to it, the null hypothesis is that setting cars on fire is not illegal. Bit odd, don't you think? Yes, patents and copyright are both protection intellectual property, but a very different kind of it.

And I am not pretending my copy is the original one (nor that I am the one who originated it) - there is a good reason to give you the exclusive right to "pose as yourself" in public, but not the same reason to interfere with my singing in the shower as long as my walls keep the noise inside.

Yeah, but your using someone else's work without proper compensation.

Apparently goverments around the world have acknowledged that intellectual property in the form of certain ideas should be protected by patents, and intellectual property in the form of a work of art should be protected by copyright. That's because both are really easy to copy. It's a protection, as to encourage people to create such works without some else taking credit or using it without proper compensation.

Protection in the form of patents should be limited, as those protect tools, having them in public domain opens up possibilities for others. This is important, as ways to do things, those tools, are limited in number and therefore scarce. However, copyright protects renditions made with tools, and there is an almost endless amount of possibilities. The odds of you creating something exactly the same as someone else without having heard it are extremely small (if the work is not trivial, that is). More important, the higher the value of the work, the smaller the chance. Copyrighted material is therefore not scarce, you can keep creating it without being bounded by existing copyright!

So, as a TL;DR: patents protects things of which possibilities are limited and therefore scarce. You can make an electric motor in only so many ways, for example. Copyright is protecting things that aren't limited, those aren't scarce. A good example on this concerning books is found here
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #37
OK, I'll bite.

Copyright doesn't pre-exist. For the majority of human existence, there was no such thing as copyright. If you sing a song to me, and I memorise it, I can sing that song to someone else. What are you going to do, kill me after you've sung it to me? Sorry, murder has, in certain circumstances, been seen as wrong through most of human existence. What are your other options: You put up with me singing it too and hope people would rather hear you sing it, or you don't sing the song at all, ever, to anyone - so no one can copy it.

Again, throughout most of human history, that's where we were: other people will sing your songs. That's life. Get over it.

You want to change that? OK, you go for it. But think: How many genuine artists are there vs how many people who just want to listen to the stuff? In pure democratic or by-force numbers, the artists don't stand a chance.


Ah, but there's a problem with that. Artists have to eat. People do want to hear music. Starving artists = no music = artist+public unhappy. We've got to find some way to pay the artists. We've got to find some way to encourage the really talented to create music, rather than go and be a plumber or something. To do this, we invent copyright. We get the government, police, state, whatever to get together and protect the artists against copying so they can make money from their music. We've taken something pretty big away from the public (the uninhibited ability to copy anything that can be copied) in return for a greater supply of something they want. It's win-win. Artists thrive, public gets more music.

That's what copyright is for in respect of artists' works. That's what patents are in respect of inventions. That's what design registration is in respect of industrial design. Artificially constructed things to enable those aspects of life to earn money. That's not to say they can't earn money without them, it's just easier, more efficient, and more reliable/predictable (= encourages more investment) for them to earn money with them. Which benefits everyone. It also open up all this information to government. Government (in many jurisdictions) get sight of and free copies of all books, music, inventions, designs etc. I only mention that because that's more than half of the story at some in the history of these "rights".


By this pure utilitarian argument, there's no reason to make copyright perpetual. It only needs to be long enough to make this work. What duration of copyright is sufficient to encourage artists to be creative? It's probably in the teens of years, possibly with some way of renegotiating rights and renewing it once. Quite amazing that the Statute of Anne AND modern mathemtical analysis of copyright both come to such similar conclusions.

However, you may be brainwashed into the "artists are special" school of thought. A day's work by an "artist" should last a life time, rather than until the next pay cheque. Hence you automatically assume that artists should have perpetual copyright in their work, and maybe so should their descendants, or (more likely) the companies they sell their copyright to.

I think that's wrong for these reasons:
1. The public gave up the ability to just copy stuff when it was new for the benefit of having more new stuff. Now you're saying they'll never get the ability to just copy stuff back, even for really old stuff? What do they get out of it? Nothing?! **** that. You can't enforce laws that almost no one agrees with. This isn't going to work.
2. Every artistic industry borrows from its history. If its history stays in copyright, it can't. Copyright is supposed to help artists. Perpetual copyright hinders future artists.
3. In reality, copyright generally doesn't sit with artists these days - it's owned by corporations. Perpetual (or even reasonably long) copyright disincentivizes their investment in new artists - the opposite of what copyright intended. This is also an argument for a very short copyright term, a break-point, and then a second renewed short copyright term - a separate argument, but one you can't even have with perpetual copyright.
4,5,6,... All the arguments made previously about orphan works, lost works, preservation, access, etc etc which, despite what copyright owners try to claim, have been proven to works out much better for things in the public domain.

I think there's a separate argument to be made about moral rights. If someone is alive, and their work is out of copyright, then maybe they have some say in how it can be used, or maybe they don't - but that's a separate issue from money.

Cheers,
David.

P.S. - IMO you are way off on patents. Patents have to be original, non-obvious, and useful. They're far more specific than you think. I can't think of any way of relating them to music that makes any sense. The closest I can get is that a new electronic synthesized drum sound is somewhat equivalent to something you could protect as a registered design.

The real reason patents get different treatment from copyright is because at least some of them matter. Their subject matter can save lives. Governments don't want it locked up for too long. The reason (especially American, and to some extent European) copyright terms have been allowed to get out of hand is because the damage is less - not because it's a good thing - but because the harm is limited. No one is going to lock the cure for cancer into one person or company's hands for 100 years, but they're not quite so concerned about granting a monopoly on "Hey Jude".

EDIT: you added another post while I was writing mine. My post replies to your previous one.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #38
... but the only reason I see people giving for limiting copyright is 'selfish', like "so I can have it for free"...
So you would rather pay hefty royalty fees for about anything that mankind has ever discovered, designed or invented? Do you even realize that almost anything you use and do in your daily life was created/discovered by someone else? Be glad you're paying royalties only for some recently created stuff.

If I discovered/invented/composed something useful, wouldn't it be selfish of me to require the whole mankind to pay for using it for eternity? Why would anyone need to pay anything after my death? Provided I'm the sole author, anyone else profiting from my work (even more so after my death) is just a leech. My offspring and relatives included - they should find their own ways of being useful to mankind and earning money on their own.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #39
So, as a TL;DR: patents protects things of which possibilities are limited and therefore scarce. You can make an electric motor in only so many ways, for example. Copyright is protecting things that aren't limited, those aren't scarce. A good example on this concerning books is found here
The number of patents vs the number of published tunes suggests you may be wrong on this. Ideas for new stuff, or how to do things in a new way, aren't that rare. Considering the cost and difficulty in obtaining a patent, vs the ease with self-publishing a song, the raw numbers may be quite similar.

Obviously many of the patents may be junk, but most music is junk too. The cure for cancer has more value than the Beatles catalogue, but I bet the Beatles catalogue has more value (financial, cultural, social, whatever) than a large percentage of US patents - precisely because music of that quality is really quite scarce. Most of the other music on the planet (which I will freely admit is quite plentiful) is really not a substitute.


Most scientific advances are of the kind that, at a given moment in history, someone is going to come up with them. This is proven by the fact that so many scientific inventions are co-discovered independently. The exact same invention. The exact same discovery.

Whereas the music of Mozart or Lennon and McCartney wasn't going to come along anyway without them. I don't think, anyway.


Yes, I'm making an argument that specific music is more scarce than specific scientific invention, not less. You've actually got it completely the wrong way around. It might be more easily substituted, but even that isn't a secure argument. Similar inventions give you different ways of doing the same thing. Is iOS more unique than Android than the Beatles are than the Stones? For me, you can swap my phone long before you can swap my music collection!

Cheers,
David.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #40
Be glad you're paying royalties only for some recently created stuff.
That why patents expire. In one way or another, you'll have to use them, because they patent things that are scarce. edit: okay, maybe not

However, if you don't like the music I composed, you don't have to use it. If you think it's too expensive, you can take another. That's the difference: being scarce or not. Oh, and BTW, this does not have to get personal, I do not endorse the view I laid out, I just want to get a few good reasons why copyright should be bounded. It looks like it works already!

[...]
Okay, so there are a few reasons I could get out of this
  • Paying for things that are ancient is something the public won't accept
  • People can re-use stuff (I wonder whether that increases or decreases creativity though)
  • It encourages industry to invest in new artists (I don't get that, if the public is sick of an artist, they won't buy it anymore, will they? And if they don't, expired stuff might cannibalise sales of not-yet expired artists)
  • Artistic rights should be separate from royality-rights (but what if the artists says: you can do that to my work, but you'll have to pay me compensation for the 'damage')

In short, I'm not so sure...

another edit: the student orchestra I'm associated with already prefers older works, because works that haven't expired yet cost > € 1000 to perform. If this was shortened to like 30 years, this 'cannibalism' might influence composers of contemporary classical music quite a bit. I think especially wind band composers, as they rely more on amateur use than for symphonic orchestras. It's not like they should lower the price, because most contemporary composers don't live very luxurious.

So, the problem is, the 'sweet spot' with the utilitarian approach is different for every art form. It's not possible to put that into legislation. Perhaps that why they those the "longest common denominator"
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #41
As long as you do not accept the patent analogy, I guess the null hypothesis would be a limit of 0 years, 0 days, 0 seconds.

That is like saying: if you don't accept that stealing a car is similar to setting fire to it, the null hypothesis is that setting cars on fire is not illegal. Bit odd, don't you think?


Am I supposed to take that kind of argument serious? The answer is the obvious yes. If there were no known reason to forbid burning cars, then there would be ... no known reason to do so. (Assuming I would want to burn your car, then there is one obvious similarity to stealing it, and if we have agreed that stealing it is wrong - then we are talking.)


You were trying to establish an infinite ban on copying, based on an argument that a work of art isn't patentable.
The primary consequence of negating patentability is as simple as: this argument for that kind of legislation does not apply.

I think you need to start with the very basics of what we tend to consider civilization: a state does not intervene in your life unless by good cause.
Criminalization requires justification. The null hypothesis is non-intervention.

If we have found that there is good reason to forbid me copying these kinds of invention - that is, the protection of patents - fine.
If you could then establish that originating a work of art is pretty much analogous to originating an invention, then you can argue that the law should intervene in an analogous way.
Merely negating the analogy does not establish any justification whatsoever, for denying me the right to copy a work of art. Indeed, negating the analogy means negating a justification for protecting copyrights.


By all means, there are reasons to deny me copying as I please. Negating analogy to anything worth forbidding, is not one of them. Take it from there.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #42
I think you need to start with the very basics of what we tend to consider civilization: a state does not intervene in your life unless by good cause.
Criminalization requires justification. The null hypothesis is non-intervention.

Sure, you're right. That's a much better way to look at it. If I look at the 'cannibalisation'-argument I put forward, it looks ridiculous and smells like censorship: make 'old' music unattractive to be sure new stuff is produced. That's definitely not the way to go. The null-hypothesis is indeed non-intervention. I lost track of the big picture in the details I guess.

But then again: there is a problem with legislation. There are reasons to restrict copying, but for different forms of art, different terms would be 'optimal'. However, coding that in legislation would be hard, it might be seen as unfair and is worthless if not done at an international level (which is not going to happen) Seeing that the Berne convention is almost 130 years old, I don't think anything is going to change in the next few years.

In the vein of this discussion, a while ago I read this: http://news.yahoo.com/italy-challenges-us-...-193944955.html
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Italy claims copyright over any images of David, a monumental marble sculpture preserved since 1873 in the Accademia Gallery in Florence. Anyone wishing to commercially use a picture of the statue, the government says, must receive legal authorisation and pay a fee -- which ArmaLite had not done.

That's copyright 510 years after creation? I really wondered how this could be true?
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #43
Oh, and BTW, this does not have to get personal
I apologize. I'm not native English and after re-reading my text, I agree it's a bit blunt. I should have phrased it better or use emoticons. I don't get personal in discussions anymore.

Regarding copying images of David... How can Italy enforce this abroad? Are they going to declare war on someone for that?

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #44
However, coding that in legislation would be hard, it might be seen as unfair and is worthless if not done at an international level (which is not going to happen) Seeing that the Berne convention is almost 130 years old, I don't think anything is going to change in the next few years.


Quite a lot has happened, indeed. The Berne convention has undergone quite a few revisions, and the US (and to a certain extent the UK) implementations are less than thirty years old, and there are other relevant treaties/conventions too. A list of parties to some of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parti...g_Organisations - notice the US is not party to the Rome Convention. AFAIK, in the US you are not entitled to royalties from airplay of your performance - but as a songwriter you are, the rationale is that if my record(ing) of Yesterday is played on the radio I should be happy they promote my record, but the situation is different for Lennon/McCartney who are credited as originators (although Lennon never wrote it). For all that I know, that could change; I am somewhat surprised it hasn't, given that the US has put pressure on other jurisdictions to rule out internet music suppliers who had assumed legal status of (internet) radio stations. After all, there is a fine line between offering streaming and playing radio, and if the latter is royalty-free ...

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #45
[...]

Okay, so there are a few reasons I could get out of this

  • Paying for things that are ancient is something the public won't accept
  • People can re-use stuff (I wonder whether that increases or decreases creativity though)
If today's copyright terms has existed way back, people have claimed that you'd kill certain Shakespeare plays, many pieces of classical music, and several Disney films.
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  • It encourages industry to invest in new artists (I don't get that, if the public is sick of an artist, they won't buy it anymore, will they? And if they don't, expired stuff might cannibalise sales of not-yet expired artists)
Until very recently, we had a 50 year recording copyright in the UK - doesn't seem to have done the UK recording industry any harm at all.
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  • Artistic rights should be separate from royality-rights (but what if the artists says: you can do that to my work, but you'll have to pay me compensation for the 'damage')
I didn't say the right "should" be separate, or should not - I said it's a separate argument.

There are some arguments for longer/fuller moral control than monetary control. There are also many practical examples of stricter monetary control than moral control - in most countries (not all) once an artist releases a recording or work through one of the standard licensing organisations, they've given up the right to stop someone they don't like (e.g. a lousy radio station in the case of a record, a lousy band in the case of a composition) playing it. In many countries, legally they don't strictly have to go through one of the standard licensing organisations, but good luck trying to have a career without them.



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another edit: the student orchestra I'm associated with already prefers older works, because works that haven't expired yet cost > € 1000 to perform. If this was shortened to like 30 years, this 'cannibalism' might influence composers of contemporary classical music quite a bit. I think especially wind band composers, as they rely more on amateur use than for symphonic orchestras. It's not like they should lower the price, because most contemporary composers don't live very luxurious.
A shorter composition copyright term would give your student orchestra (who presumably also don't live very luxurious lives based on the income from the orchestra?) more music to play. Sounds good to me. I like 50 years. Even at 30 or 40 years, that's a reasonable duration to earn money from something. Sat down at 25, am I going to decide not to write a piece or create a new arrangement because I'll stop getting paid for it when I'm 55 or 65 or 75? Sat down at 40, the piece I do today will earn money until I'm 70, 80 or 90 with those reasonable 3/40/50 year terms - what is the point of having longer?

There's new copyright in arrangements. There's separate (typically, shorter) copyright in the physical layout of the musical score. Hence publishers and arrangers (as well as composers) have a renewable income stream - assuming they're adding something and charging accordingly.


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So, the problem is, the 'sweet spot' with the utilitarian approach is different for every art form. It's not possible to put that into legislation. Perhaps that why they those the "longest common denominator"
In the EU, the just picked the longest copyright term of any country, and forced that on every country. From a rational stand-point, that's a really strange policy.

The reason was simple - industry lobbying.

Cheers,
David.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #46
Perhaps it's just my imagination... But I have a feeling that the industry needs to rely on older material (as source of income) because there isn't so much new, original, high-quality content anymore or there is but it's too fragmented.

In the past, there was no Youtube, no Facebook, no Myspace to promote one's self. One needed to sign a contract and the industry took care of marketing and promotion.
In the past, there was no I-tunes to sell one's music easily. One needed the industry to press and distribute CDs for sale.

Nowadays, it's possible to bypass the industry (renting a studio for recording/mixing is not prohibitively expensive). I understand their grasping at straws.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #47
I have a feeling that the industry needs to rely on older material (as source of income) because there isn't so much new, original, high-quality content anymore or there is but it's too fragmented.


Old news. The industry had its heyday when CDs became mainstream, when they could first raise prices significantly and then also pump out titles people already owned. Those days appear to be gone forever - well people do pay to stream music they already own, but nobody "collects" that format, nobody is buying all that music that gathers dust in the shelf.
And a sealed CD that could be exchanged was the perfect gift to anyone with the slightest interest in music (and who hasn't? They needed a kick in the right direction ;-) )

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #48
Re: radio royalties for sound recording airplay in the US: terrestrial radio companies big & small have always successfully argued that they shouldn't have to pay to promote the big record companies' merchandise. The record companies are basically paying for the airtime anyway.

So what the big record companies have done, aside from influencing royalty policies in other countries, is set it up so that in the U.S., the new forms of radio (satellite and Internet) do have to pay royalties on the sound recordings. The next logical step is already happening: now they are saying "gosh, look at the discrepancy! all forms of radio pay these royalties except terrestrial radio! this makes no sense, and the only solution is for terrestrial radio to pay just like the others!" Similar arguments are trotted out to try to get all the different royalty rates to match whatever the highest ones are.

Watching these baboons stab each other in the back would be comical if we all didn't end up paying for their shenanigans.

Question about vinyl rips.

Reply #49
I had thought that both kinds of airplay paid the creator of the piece (circle c) a royalty, but not the performer (circle p)?