Author: EEBaum
Date: 2007-08-29 03:04
There is a difference between the legacies.
If a person who operates a dry cleaning shop passes the legacy to his children, those children continue to work the shop. New work is continuously put into the shop, and new output is constantly produced. If nobody maintains the shop, the revenue stream ends. Even if they hand it to some other management company and aren't working it themselves, the shop can go under, and the revenue stream ends.
If a composer writes pieces and passes the legacy to his children, those children don't do a darn thing other than receive a check. They don't write any music themselves.
In either situation, though, the person can save up money to give to their children.
The dry cleaner does indeed produce a tangible product. You take your clothes to him, and he cleans them. He cleans them once, they become clean once. Cleanness is quantifyable. If he stopped cleaning clothes today, they would stop becoming clean today, and a person 10 years from now wouldn't find their clothes any cleaner.
Now, in an ideal situation, I might have more sympathy for your arguments. However, it isn't the artist-wanting-a-legacy that is extending copyrights. It's the recording, publishing, and movie industries. The vast majority of music earns the vast majority of its money within the first short period. 50 years past the death of the author, the work is almost never producing much cash, certainly not enough to leave a decent nest egg. Except for the certain few items, the Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Beatles, etc. MOST of which are owned by a corporation, and if the actual author sees any of the money at all, it's practically negligible by that point. It makes sense for the corporation, because they have enormous volumes of the stuff. It doesn't make sense for the artist who, if the works were NOT under copyright, would likely see their work enjoyed far more.
Really, it would be nice if society would actually have this discussion to determine who should be entitled to what. And if we came up to the conclusion Ski is proposing, as a society, I would be happy with that. But we haven't. We're still using a system that claims to be in place to promote the creation of new works by creating a temporary monopoly. The terms have been extended, at the behest of large corporations and their lobbyists, under the guise of promoting the poor starving artist who can't feed their grandchildren. No public discussion. No input from all sides involved. Just some big players declaring what's best for others, "on their behalf." And not even creating a new system for it, but inching an old system along piecemeal until it no longer does what it was intended to do.
I also don't see why it should be society's business to ensure that one person's stream of income is inherited by their children. Perhaps the composer would do well to invest his money in dry cleaning? :P
his creation, that remains uniquely his, no matter how long he's alive or dead. It doesn't belong to society; it belongs to HIM. He created it.
But it doesn't belong to him, because he sold it to Universal or BMG. Chances are, he couldn't give free copies of it to his friends legally. He retains AUTHORSHIP, which is a formality at best. What can be done with OWNERSHIP is a societal construct, and that's what's being extended.
Assume for a moment that copyright was indefinite. After all, it belongs to the person who created it. Now imagine that, tomorrow, the heirs of JS Bach came out and made a public statement that they are pulling all of his works out of circulation. No further copies could be made of any works of JS Bach. And they would be totally within their rights to do so.
Not to mention the myriad works that would NOT have been written if current copyright laws had existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Music, especially, is an art of borrowing, and of building on past listening. Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, for example, would have to have gone through a small army of agents and publishers, and would quite likely have been denied permission outright or sued into oblivion.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
Post Edited (2007-08-29 03:07)
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