To play devil's advocate, why should people continue to be compensated for work they did long ago? It's normal today, but it wasn't always that way, and it could be time to revisit that assumption. The amount and quality of works would change for sure, but there's nothing I know if that says there aren't other reasonable systems out there.
Especially in light of the fact that copyright is not fulfilling it's intended promise. Specifically that the government protects the work for a time, and in return the work goes into the public domain after a reasonable amount of time in order to enrich society as a whole.
What about things they did 6 months ago? The argument is whether music should be copyrightable at all, not whether 100-year copyright terms are reasonable.
Why indeed? We don't pay for food each time we reap the benefits of the nutrition it provided down the line. Weightlifters don't pay royalties to protein powder companies. It could be argued that artists could also be expected to not be paid beyond the initial creation of a work. It would be a very different world to be sure, but it's not a given that it would be a worse world.
No. There are two arguments. Whether music should be copyrightable at all is settled (though a fringe continues to argue it). That means that the second argument, whether 100-year copyright terms are reasonable, is in fact the main argument at this time.
> To play devil's advocate, why should people continue to be compensated for work they did long ago?
We often don't know which songs are worth millions and which are worth tens until years later.
If we believe that people who write songs should be compensated roughly proportionally to how valuable their songs are, it is hard to think of a way to actually do that which does not involve compensation long after the song is written.
Because "fair compensation" is a reeeeally hard term to define legally, while giving someone a monopoly on a particular song and letting the market determine how to price that song's usage is a more workable mechanism.
But it’s really not. Workable that is. The exclusive control of copies throws a huuuge wrench in the machinery.
Just in the copy providing department I still consistently run in to the situation where there is no legal means for me to enjoy certain albums, tv-series, movies, games or software.
But that’s just the problem with the actually legal copies. I find it even more distressing that some of the best works I want to enjoy are illigal to begin with due to the authors infringig of the exclusive right of some longe abandoned work.
And that’s just my experience. Considering the resources and suffering that goes into maintaining this state of affairs just boggles the mind.
> But it’s really not. Workable that is. The exclusive control of copies throws a huuuge wrench in the machinery.
Not really (at least, not in addressing lucasmullens' point). I'm making a movie or an ad. I think your song would be just perfect for it. You won't let me use it on terms that I consider reasonable. Well, there's more than one song that would be (approximately) perfect there. I'll see if their copyright holders are more reasonable.
If you absolutely have to have Song X in your movie, then your point is correct. But I assert that, most of the time, that isn't the case. And behold, now there's a market.
If I make an emulator. Perhaps it would be nice to provide a few classic games with upgraded graphics and audio. Even finding the rights holders could be a challenge.
Perhaps I found the new Star Wars movie crap, a few cuts and edits. And it’s much better. Only can only dream of getting the rights of releasing it.
Perhaps the mastering of a Metallica album was just bad. With a little skills applied to the problem and there you go, a much nicer edition of the album. Cant really add it to Spotify though.
This can't actually be the reason -- music in particular is subject to a variety of compulsory license schemes for which "fair compensation" is legally defined, and the copyright holder does not have the ability to prevent someone from covering / broadcasting / etc. their song.
Interestingly enough we have a great example of limited copyright protections for musicians in China that are still fabulously wealthy and successful. Their wealth is generated through performing/concerts, advertising, etc while their music is freely available for streaming/download.
Most of the value in the music industry has gone to Apple and Spotify shareholders the last 20 years, not labels. There is at least $100-$150 billion in cumulative shareholder value sitting there from just that. Spotify is worth more than all the major labels combined.
The iPod doesn't exist without the music from the artists. Apple didn't share their hardware profits with artists, and they're not sharing any follow on value from the iPhone either (which was entirely made possible by the iPod).
People hate labels, they mostly love Apple and Spotify, so they largely get a pass on this. The real money in the music industry during the iPod era, was in the hardware.
Should we really be incentivizing making music as a career? And besides, I don't think the bulk of music is being created by people being compensated for it.
Somewhere out there, there exists an alternate universe where musicians ponder nonchalantly whether people should be compensated for software. "Can't they just sell software logo t-shirts?"
There's a ton of people giving away very useful software and all the files and tools to easily read and modify it. There's a handful of musicians giving away music too, but I don't know of many giving away the files and tools to read and modify it.
As much as people may speak of art reflecting its creator, once it gets into the outside world, it becomes an interaction with everyone it contacts. There are a million new perspectives formed, and plenty that could be done to extend the work.
I could imagine taking software principles and applying them to art in many ways:
* Bugfixes-- from simple grammar flaws, to finishing dangled story threads, why aren't we patching and re-releasing novels?
* Technical improvements-- I could imagine, for example, a speaker manufacturer remixing songs so they sounded better on their hardware.
* Customization -- if you've made an attractive image or song, and it hasn't been repurposed to sell Diet Pepsi, you haven't really arrived.
The limit to these visions is that they run headlong both into the literal principles of copyright law, and the philosophy that art is somehow sacred as-is, rather than being a baseline for better and better things. Shorter copyrights and mandatory licensing can make it happen.
> Bugfixes-- from simple grammar flaws, to finishing dangled story threads, why aren't we patching and re-releasing novels?
This is pretty similar to what’s happened with Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. He’s repeatedly reworked it, tweaking the production and verses and in one case adding a whole new song.
> Customization -- if you've made an attractive image or song, and it hasn't been repurposed to sell Diet Pepsi, you haven't really arrived.
https://youtu.be/zxyTk3ligAc – a band playing a very close copy of their hit song Winchester Cathedral as a coke ad.
"He" being the operative word. Third parties aren't doing their own custom distributions. This becomes a big deal if you can't convince the original creator that something needs fixed.
If you've got a big enough vision that you lock horns with Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel, you fork it and release anyway. If you have a different vision than Kanye West for the album, good luck getting your version through the courts.
The importance of music and the importance of software is worlds apart. Not to mention there's enough music already made to cover everyone's need. Software is nowhere near that.
Most of today's software is a rehash of crap we already had. It's just the dumb clients render HTML instead of cursor positions and ansi colors now. And the smart clients are smaller.
That is a frightening thing to read. Just because you don't appreciate music doesn't mean you can dismiss out of hand its cultural value. I would rather live in a world without software and computers than one without music, not even close
Are you saying software is unimportant or music is unimportant?
A choice between the two, like choosing to be blind or deaf, I'd choose music, I'd choose blindness.
Music is much more fundamental to the human condition than, <laugh out loud>... software <more laughing>
Gather round the keyboard family, let's code together, you do the functions, I'll write main!
(This is intentionally harshly written, in response to the obvious hyperbole of this "Not to mention there's enough music already made to cover everyone's need" - whatever that is).
I'm aware it's all subjective, but I'll still write this:
Music is life, Software is lifestyle.
moetech, find some music that elicits a response from
a part of your lizard brain you didn't know existed, that makes you cry with connection. That's just the beginning of the journey.
>Should we really be incentivizing making music as a career?
Of course not. There is an enormous glut of cultural works, and people's quality of life would not be meaningfully harmed if all commercial production stopped. See:
> Should we really be incentivizing making music as a career?
Instrument practice, sound engineering are a crazy amount of work in order to get to a professional level. It's so bizarre to hear people say things like that, they have 0 consideration for the amount of effort put into the former, just because they can download 1 millions tracks on the internet in one click...
There are probably a hundred times more professional-level guitarists than professional guitarists. It’s a ton of work, but it’s a ton of work that a lot of people already put in just for fun.
Professional production is very hard, but it’s also kind of a moving target. A lot of production is trying to hit trends set by other producers so that your music sounds professional itself. It’s largely competitive rather than artistically significant, and there’s some great production that doesn’t sound professional but still works.
Yes, we should. If you want things done well, you want people to be able to make a living doing them. I'd love to see any sources on your claims regarding to music creation - certainly, a huge portion of quality artwork is the result of people being paid for it/creating with the expection that they'll be able to sell it. This has been true for centuries.
I do support some form of copyright - e.g. if you earn money based on my work, you should compensate me accordingly - but not for private, non-commercial use.
There's an overlooked assumption, that art should be a commercial product sold in the marketplace. Maybe some things shouldn't or don't need to be sold in the marketplace. Maybe art should be more like free software (or just be free - let's not parochially limit ourselves to software analogies).
Certainly for 'purposes' or aspects of art - as enlightenment, enrichment, the pinnacle of culture and civilization - free distribution would be better, spreading its benefits more widely. Also, like free-as-in-speech software (sorry), each work of art is part of the creative process for the next one; it can be reused, modified, extracted, etc, so free art would be much better in that respect too.
I understand that artists want to eat and have roofs over their heads. I want a pony. Seriously, perhaps there are other ways to accomplish that. UBI?
> Seriously, perhaps there are other ways to accomplish that.
Yet another hidden assumption right there: that art must (or should) come from full-time professional artists (as opposed to hobbyists and/or part-timers).
I can't think of any reason why music copyright should ever expire. Music is (1) purely the product of creation (i.e. you're not just taking ownership of something like land that's naturally occurring); and (2) completely non-rival (there are an infinite number of original songs for people to create). I don't see why rights in something like that shouldn't be perpetual. Why should anyone else ever acquire rights to something that's purely the product of your mind?
That's an interesting perspective, maybe this response will help.
It's tempting to think of copyright in terms of ownership. I wrote the song, so I own it, and anyone else who uses it is violating my ownership in some way. But that's incorrect. Copyright is about control. The holder of copyright is granted a certain amount of legal control over everyone else's actions. I can prevent Jack from selling a copy of my song. I can prevent Jill from performing my song live. They no longer have rights they used to have.
Of course there is no "natural" basis for this concept, unlike ownership of physical goods. It was invented merely as an economic tool to incentivize production. Legally, it's purely a fiction of government. If Jill moved to another country and performed my song, I might have no way to stop her. I'd probably never even find out. So how could I have some fundamental right to stop her from singing what she wants to sing?
Ethically, I would turn your question around: Why do I get to control other people's actions that don't affect me? Why should I be able to sell that control or hand it down to my heirs? It's not clear what that argument could be.
> Ethically, I would turn your question around: Why do I get to control other people's actions that don't affect me? Why should I be able to sell that control or hand it down to my heirs? It's not clear what that argument could be.
All ownership is a right to "control other peoples' actions." What "fundamental right" does a farmer have to keep people from picking ears of corn off his field? Surely the farmer can't stop someone from exercising their natural right to grab whatever is laying around in nature for their own sustenance?
And infringement does "affect" the copyright owner, just as much as taking an ear of corn from a farmer's field. It reduces the market value of an economically valuable resource that the person created through their own labor. The response of "taking the ear of corn from the farmer leaves him with one less ear of corn" while copying a song does not seems like an ethically irrelevant distinction to me. The farmer doesn't care about possessing the corn. The only thing he cares about is how much he can sell his corn crop for, and the fact that someone taking an ear of corn reduces his income. Likewise, infringement reduces the money a content creator can get for having created a song or movie or book.
In both cases, what's lost is opportunities to make a sale. In the case of the corn, it's one lost opportunity per ear of corn (the stolen ear is one you can't sell to anyone), while in the case of the song, it's a fractional lost opportunity per copy (some of the people who get a copy would have bought it). That a difference of degree, not one of fundamental morality.
You make an interesting point and I want to acknowledge that, but I disagree and will try to explain why. If you take an ear of corn that belongs to me, I no longer have the corn. This is not true if you perform my song. On the other hand, I'm not sure I have some fundamental right to profit from the corn, just because I own the corn. That seems like a stretch. Similarly it seems to me very entitled to say I have some right to money because somebody else sang my song.
Your analogy gets to a distinction I've seen made between personal property -- something I own and use for myself -- and private property, something I (or a company) own and use in order to make money. As I understand it some on the socialism spectrum deny the fundamental right to own private property in this sense (though not the right to own personal property), so they would use your analogy against you.
You also get at what ownership of physical items means. Corn is easier to justify ownership over because of the effort that went into growing and tending it. A less clear case is picking fruit off a wild tree that happens to grow on someone else's property. Here again I think you would find people arguing the fruit tree belongs to some extent to everybody (e.g. some countries have laws protecting your right to hike through "my" land). So again your analogy can work against your argument, maybe ownership of this corn or fruit tree is not such a natural right either.
In summary, you say "what's lost is opportunities to make a sale" and I would not recognize that as a fundamental right. I would recognize a fundamental right to own a physical item for personal use and not have it taken from you, and I would recognize the right to say or sing whatever you want.
So you have decided what rights you believe as fundamental, but through no arguable basis. Unfortunately for you, the rest of society (as evinced by copyright laws) have decided that the of opportunities to make a sale are fundamental. There is no such thing as a fundamental right - they only exist because a certain group of people decides to abide by them and will fight to the death to mail Tain them
If you believe that, do you also believe I have a right to take any code you ever write, regardless of how you've (heh) "licensed" it, and bake it into any closed source product I happen to want to use it in? If not, why not?
I don't have a natural right to prevent you from doing so.
But there's social contracts on top of that. Copyright is one such. It's not a right at all - it's a privilege (specifically, monopoly grant on distribution of certain information), that we as a society have decided to grant some people, because it incentivizes them to do things that we as a society want them to do.
Coincidentally, this also applies to regular property in a broad sense. The shirt that you wear on your back is yours in a physical sense; but, say, an apartment that you own and rent out in New York while living in California is only yours because the society declares it to be, and enforces that on your behalf - you don't have a natural right to such property, it's a social contract.
And no, I'm not a communist. Not anymore so than this guy:
"It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all... It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society."
I have mixed feelings about this, not sure exactly where I stand.[1] I think I might be ethically okay with a world without copyright control on code, especially because you could sign contracts governing how people use your code in exchange for revealing it to them. But it would take a lot of getting used to.
[1] Personally, I've put a few small open-source projects online and do take the stance that people can use them however they want, I assert no control over their use (I request attribution). But I don't make money from writing code so I'm not saying I think everyone else should do this.
No, you couldn't. A contract that binds on someone after they obtain your source code is a license. In the coherent version of your world, once you've revealed your source code to someone, you can't stop them from publishing it to everybody else for free.
I mean, the license could have a nondisclosure/confidentiality agreement, right?
That wouldn't be a full substitute for copyright though. For example, if they broke the contract and distributed the code I don't think you could prevent other people from distributing it further.
If you believe in contracts that selectively release source code for a fee subject to nondisclosure and other limitations on redistribution, you effectively believe in copyright. At most, you're saying that the default should be an unlimited right to redistribution. But that's not especially meaningful, because opting away from that default would be trivial, and practically every professional musician would do so immediately.
The problem is that music has no inherent scarcity or exclusivity. Because there's no natural limit to the supply of copies, the marginal cost goes to zero.
To create a viable market, the entire rest of the country/world has to agree to inconvenience itself, simulating a scarcity by saying 'you're the only one who can legally make copies.'
So it's more a matter of hassling everyone else for the benefit of a relatively small group of creators. This is something that can be seen as a value-maximization problem.
How much extra music do we, as a society, get to enjoy by adding another N years to copyright? And what does that cost us in enforcement, licensing, and reduced ability to respin old work?
There are certainly not an infinite number of original songs. There have already been lawsuits where songs that might have legitimately been independent creations were litigated for being too similar.
