Interesting debate, although I think the Supreme Court made the wrong decision. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63196-2003Jan15.html The Supreme Court upheld a 1998 federal law yesterday that extended the life of most copyrights by 20 years, deciding a landmark copyright case in favor of artists, writers and the entertainment industry. A loose coalition of independent scholars, publishers and Internet archivists had argued that, by lengthening existing copyrights, the law, known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in honor of the late singer and House member, effectively made those copyrights perpetual -- violating the constitutional provision that says Congress may spur intellectual productivity by granting copyrights for "limited times."
I can (grudgingly) accept that Congress has the right to extend the copy right period. However, that doesn't change the fact that it was a lousy idea whose benefits go primarily large copyright holders. I see that a major argument by supporters of the law is the claim that it will spur creativity. I am at a loss to understand how people will be anymore creative when they have been dead for 69 years then they were when they had only been dead for 49. For that matter, can you imagine a creative artist saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't have produced that brilliant work, if I'd known that my heirs would only get revenue from it for 50 years after I'm dead'?
Also, why do corporations retain copyrights for 95 years, but individual authors or artists for only 70 years? Who says Congress isn't in the pocket of the corporations?
70 years beyond the death of the author, actually. Though why it serves anyone to hold a copyright that long is beyond me.
I have few problems with Dr Seuss' or Walt Disney's heirs getting a few extra years, and I appreciate the law's exemptions for teaching and research, but I think it would be better if at some point (50 years, or 70, or whatever) the burden of liability should shift from losses suffered by the heirs to gains earned by the user. For example, someone who sells DVD copies of "Steamboat Willie" is very different from someone who publishes 70-year-old works on a free web site. Case in point: Disney has been so protective of its copyrights that it has issued cease-and-desist orders to pediatric hospitals that paint Disney characters on their walls for the sick children. That remains Disney's right under this law. At some point, these companies need to be smacked back into place.
The upholding of this copyright law will have little effect, at least as it pertains to music (I'm not sure about other European intellectual property laws). In Europe, the copyrights on recordings are held for 50 years after the release of the product, regardless if the recordings were made and released in America. What is happening now is that small labels are starting to release works that have entered the public domain at a lower cost than they were previously available for. Some of these recordings could conceivably end up on American shelves via either the Internet or by browsing through your local record store's import section. This is a good thing, imo as it increases the public's access to these products and promotes competition in the marketplace. There was an excellent article in The New York Times a few weeks back about this subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/02/i...Y.html?ex=1042559430&ei=1&en=3b861a69f9639e9a
There was an article in either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back about how copyright deadlines were shorter in Europe than they were in the US, so now they're starting to have to worry about increased availability of, say, 50s Elvis recordings from European manufacturers, because the copyright expires sooner there than it does here. Suddenly, the value of the copyright is practically nil.
I was going to start a thread about this. This ruling serves as yet another reminder that, in addition to the usual suspects (energy, tobacco, insurance) that people say Congress is "in the pocket" of, you can always add Big Entertainment to that list. The frightening thing is that they get congressmen like Fritz Hollings, who probably wouldn't know how to turn a computer on, to carry the water for them, while they pass draconian digital copyright laws.