In reaction to this story some days ago we are starting to see folks taking notice of this theft of material from the public
https://forum.winmxworld.com/index.php?topic=11398.0.htmlThere are two articles on Techdirt addressing this act of "piracy" by recording industry lobbyists, the first addresses the billion Euros estimated revenue that the lobbyists paymasters will gain for their anti consumer and underhand activities.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110914/02572215947/cost-copyright-extension-europe-1-billion-euros-paid-public.shtml Martin Kretschmer has a post up at the 1709 blog discussing the recent wholesale seizure of the public domain in Europe, and how it not only won't help most musicians (which is the basis for passing it), but will cost the public over 1 billion euros, based on the EU Commission's own figures:
72 percent of the financial benefits from term extension will accrue to record labels. Of the 28 percent that will go to artists, most of the money will go to superstar acts, with only 4 percent benefiting those musicians mentioned in the European Council press release as facing an "income gap at the end of their life times". Many performers also do not appear to understand that the proposal would lead to a redistribution of income from living to dead artists.
In an interview with the NY Times yesterday, I said: "This is a dreadful day for musicians and consumers. Policymakers are schizophrenic, speaking a language of change and innovation, but then respond to lobbying by extending the right which gave rise to the problem in the first place. This only entrenches a cynical attitude toward copyright law and brings it into further disrepute."
I thoroughly agree that these moves do nothing to help maintain respect for copyright law when the law seems unable to address its responsibilities to the public in turn, an ever changing poor deal with the public is in fact no deal, which leads nicely on to this next article penned with the same thought in mind.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110913/12095615937/shouldnt-unilateral-retroactive-copyright-extension-mean-copyright-is-void.shtmlWith Europe approving this ridiculous retroactive copyright extension, which has set off an angry public who is reasonably frustrated that they'll be paying the cost to support a few rockstars and dying record labels -- there's an argument that this fundamentally breaks copyright law. And, it's making me wonder if it actually should mean that copyright is null and void.
I've argued in the past that this constant expansion of both copyright and copyright enforcement has only served to make people respect the law less and less, because it gets further and further away from what people think is reasonable. Rather than making more people respect the law, it drives more people to ignore the law. Dirk Poot takes that argument a bit further, and suggests that with such things, we've actually gone full circle and copyright law has become exactly what it was originally designed to stop.
The rest of the argument is quite well written and I urge anyone who cares about their Rights to take a peek at something many ministers in the EU have forgotten , no doubt helped of course by their cartel gift bearers. It seems to me that we are forgetting just why we have a copyright law, its not simply to bring in tax revenues for an exchequer or keep those who have been creative at some stage in their life in the lap of luxury forever, if that was the case copyright law would have been a non starter some time ago, however for the benefit of those who might be blind to how we have reached the current circumstance lets rehash the basic premise of just why society at large even allows such artificial monopolies that are becoming so damaging to the public.
A copyright is a fixed term monopoly granted to a "creator" of something that is hopefully both original and thought provoking or in pretend parlance a "one off" creation, we know in many cases this right is granted for material that is not really original or a one off but still for a limited time we grant a monopoly to the first person past the post expressing the said creativity, this is hoped to get them motivated enough to create further works instead of forcing such folks to work in the same vein as the rest of us have to for our daily bread and roof over our head, back in the day when there where fewer folks and more limited areas of communication this idea seems to have worked well but with now billions more humans on the planet all duplicating at some stage what used to be called original creativity and having the ability to globalise their "creative" spark in often near competing time frames as for it to be unclear if there even was an original creative process by any single individual this is a harder definition to make. For this reason the idea that someone has pipped you to the post by a few hours or minutes is pretty galling, even worse if your now banned from creating anything similar for up to 70 years luckily in the musical arena this is often not the case but in the scientific community this scenario is all too prevalent and damaging, we all want our favourite artist to earn from their work the same as we all expect wages at the end of the week for our work but when they continue to be paid for not 25, not 50, but 70-95 years and in reality its their record companies getting the revenues not so much any "creator" can this monopoly really be respected as being fair ?
