In what may well be described as the greatest act of theft in living memory, the Eu has decided that its ok for us all to pay a "music tax" on existing works by extending the copyright on them to a ludicrous 70-95 years.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/53526You’d think mouldy oldies such as Paul McCartney, Cliff Richard (right), U2, Yoko Ono [Yoko Ono?], Barry Gibb, Petula Clark and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa [?] already have enough cash stashed away to keep themselves, their children, their children’s children, their children’s children’s children’s, and so on, in luxury for ever.
“They were among 4,500 artists who last year signed a newspaper advertisement demanding the UK government extend the copyright in sound recordings to 95 years and now they’re, celebrating a major victory because a European Parliament committee says it's OK to boost it to 95 years, said Times Online.
This is nothing short of governments and the entertainment industry seizing works from the public domain. As we've said before, the purpose of copyright law is to incent the creation of new works. If existing copyright law was enough to incentivize the creation at the time, then there’s simply no reason to retroactively extend the law. This proposal, which various studies have shown will do little to help content creators, has been pushed for a long time by the record labels. It had been blocked in Europe for a while, but for reasons unknown, Denmark recently changed its mind, thereby enabling this effort to flat out seize material from the public.”
I have to agree this is not only morally wrong but pure selfishness by many well known artists who instead of working to create further or do other work as the rest of us have to do they simply wish to sit on their thumbs and live on what amounts to a free ride from the public for a few hours work done tens of years ago.
I can see why folks are no longer respecting their copyrights when they are pushing for such selfish enrichment at the expense of the public who are to be further deprived of their rights to copyright expired material simply to let the recording industry fat cats get fatter and those who work for a living poorer, shame on you artists, this really seems like a declaration of war on the public, lets hope the artists and labels accept with grace the backlash that's obviously going to hit them as they cant expect to steal from the public and remain unaffected.
