The international term of a patent is 14 to 20 years. Will someone explain why it isn’t as lengthy as copyrights, or, conversely, why copyrights are so long compared to patents?
If the intention is to allow the creator to profit from his creation, but not forever, shouldn’t both patents and copyrights share similar time restrictions?
There are lots of reasons why there are very different attitudes towards patent and copyright terms.
A few include:
patent protection Is a lot broader than copyright protection. There is no fair use exception. There is no independent creation.
patents close off an entire IDEA, whereas copyrights close off only a particular expression of an idea
patents tie up knowledge and science and technology, and social technological and societal advancement depends on being able to build on those ideas. You can build on an idea in the copyright realm without copying the expression.
creative expression is viewed as tied up with the personality, persona or identity of the creator. It is seen as a moral right to give the creator lifetime control and to give him or her the ability to give the benefits to children and grandchildren.
Just to emphasize here, the fair use doctrine and the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law make it very very different from patent law.
For example, if you HAVE to copy a portion of a creative work of expression for educational, scholarly, news reporting, political commentary, review, archiving, preservation, etc., purposes, fair use lets you do that. That doesn’t exist in patent law.
Are you sure that there isn’t another reason why CBS won’t release it on DVD (even as an Amazon “DVD-on-Demand” title)? For example, there could be some rights issue with whoever wrote the title music, or perhaps it could be that one of the actors doesn’t want it released. (On GSN, a number of game shows have entire weeks of 1970s shows skipped because the celebrity refused to let them air.)
No, and here’s one reason why; what if, say, Shout Factory wants to pay for the rights to release it on DVD, only for somebody else to release a pirated version first, and when Shout Factory and CBS go to court, a judge says, “You didn’t defend the copyright against Kamakiri, so it’s public domain now”?
However, I think your biggest mistake was to threaten to call your lawyers. One company said that the minute anybody mentions lawyers, the complaint goes to its legal department.
That can’t happen in copyright law.
I think people often get confused between copyright and trademark.
though that is the case for trademarks; I think That Don Guy and you are agreeing.
You are confusing trademarks with copyrights.
Oops! ninja’ed several times
Yepper. If an oil company sits on a breakthrough in battery technology for 50 years, that’s evil and harms the world. If loratadine can only be sold by the Claratin folks at $3 a tab for the next 100 years, it makes the world a much worse place for millions of people.
OTOH, if I can’t publish my own Mr. Natural comic books for my own profit, until after the death of Robert Crumb’s hypothetical children – that probably encourages creativity, and seems completely just to me. (On the third hand, if works are unavailable, I’ve got nothing against fans sharing Xerox copies, medium-quality digital versions. There are gray areas and fuzzy lines.)
I really want to buy a DVD set of the series Ed (sometimes known as Stuckeyville), but it has never been released. The internet agrees that this is because of the music rights - the show used a lot of really good songs, and now the rights holders need to lock down deals with the rights owner of each song before it can be released. Your “use it or lose it” proposal - would that treat the songs as part of the work as a whole and ignore whether the individual rights holders has been using them? Or would it be ok to modify the original and replace the soundtrack with freeware music? And if the latter is the case, then will consumers have any way to know in advance that this is the muzak edition?
Something similar actually happened with the animated TV show Daria. Lots of really good music on the original but they didn’t think to lock down rights to syndicated or DVD release. Demand got insane for the series on DVD but they couldn’t get those musicians to agree - so they released it with crappy new music that had nothing to do with the feel of the series. Lots of very peeved fans didn’t know they weren’t getting the original music and were not happy.
And with WKRP in Cinncinati: the music was an integral part of the show, but in the late 70s, no-one thought about getting long-term licences in their contracts.
I cannot see the line between Shatner’s lesser works and his greater ones. They are all equally … Shatneresque.
Ed ran from 2000 to 2004. That’s awfully recent. You’re telling me that when they got the rights to use the music in the show, they forgot to make sure it could also appear in the DVDs? That’s pretty hard to believe.
“Syndicated” means reruns, doesn’t it? Daria ran from 1997 to 2001. We’re not talking about shows from the 1950s. I simply cannot imagine that a show from the late 1990s didn’t make syndication a standard feature of all the forms and releases and legal stuff.
Am I naive? Or maybe these were famously exceptional cases where the lawyers – they are human – simply screwed up?
Well, it was a cable show: were they syndicating cable shows then? Releasing TV shows on DVD wasn’t really a thing yet.
Wiseguy is another example of a series whose dvd release was long delayed over music rights.
Well, I based my post on my memories that in the 80s and 90s, it was already pretty common for shows to appear on VHS, and I just presumed it would be so for recent shows on DVD. But I should do a little research, and your comment about it being a cable show is significant too. So I did do some research, and here’s what I found:
I’m not an MTV-watcher, and I never heard of Daria. But it was pretty easy to determine that it ran from 1997 to 2001. Wikipedia includes it on a list of programs broadcast by MTV. That same list shows another program, also animated, titled The Head, which premiered in 1994, and “The first 13 episodes were released on VHS under the title The Head Saves the Earth.” Finally, the website Rotten Tomatoes tells us that “MTV’S THE HEAD - THE HEAD SAVES THE EARTH … [was released] On DVD: Sep 12, 1995”
My guess is that there’s a typo, and it was not the DVD, but rather the VHS version that was released in 1995. (The Tower Records website says the VHS was released Aug 22 1995.) But in any case, the lawyers should have known to include this possibility in the paperwork.
My understanding is that there are two kinds of licenses involved. One is the license to play a song. The other is a license to sell a copy of the song. Because playing a song is ephemeral, the license for this is cheaper. But the license for selling a copy of the song is more expensive - once a person owns that copy he can play the song for himself as many times as he wants.
Studios which are planning on broadcasting a song during a show pay the play rate. Selling a dvd of that show however requires the sale rate. The difference can be significant.
At the time they’re making the show, nobody wants to sign the higher rate with an eye on theoretical future dvd sales. You want to keep the budget of your show low so it will stay in production. And you have no idea at this point whether there will even be a future market for your series.
So studios make shows and broadcast them. And then if they’re lucky, the show is reasonably popular and a few years later they decide there’s a market for dvd sales. This is the point when they go back and negotiate for the right to sell copies of the songs.
To answer your question, I don 't think it was the slickest move. You are in the wrong.
And they probably weren’t all that impressed with your lawyer threat.
http://http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daria#Music_and_licensing has a good quick overview of this, including a direct quote from the creator about the expense of the music rights.