Very true. So let’s look at the work of art as a piece of capital, a money making machine. What’s a dollar of profit 30 years hence worth? Let’s assume a 12% hurdle rate. Nah, let’s make it 10%.
Worth of a dollar paid in 30 years time: 6 cents.
40 years: 2 cents
50 years: Less than a penny.
Copyright used to last 14 years. These extensions are purely a matter of wealth transfer from audience to creator. Which isn’t so bad if we’re talking about Hemingway. But for a corporation, there’s no business reason why copyrights couldn’t be capped at 30 years. It wouldn’t change the incentives to create in any meaningful sense.
For an author, I’d permit copyright renewals up to 22 years after their death or 32 years altogether, whichever is longer. (I tack on 2-3 years in order to grant the creators the ability to capture golden anniversary revenue. I’d even extend that to BigCorp.)
It’s funny because Ed is about a lawyer who gets fired from his high powered job for screwing up a single comma in a contract, costing his employer a fortune.
Tom Cavanagh, the star of Ed, says music rights are the core issue:
Are we going to see Ed on DVD?
Tom Cavanagh: Yeah, I guess they’re talking about it. Last I heard was they were close on season one. The stumbling block as it’s like a lot of the time is the music rights. They were fortunate enough because of the clout they had as the Letterman’s producers to get a lot of great music as one-offs, of course when you put those on a DVD that becomes a whole different thing.
That was in 2007. The same site references a later interview with Cavanagh that adds more detail:
But as with most shows at the beginning of the era when third-party pop and rock songs were used in abundance on shows, the folks at NBC and Worldwide Pants didn’t realize they’d need to secure DVD rights to all the fantastic music used in the show. Cavanagh has told reporters that there will probably never be DVDs of the series because those rights are so expensive.
Things have changed quite a lot in the past 15 years. In 2000, less than 10 percent of households had DVD players. Full series were on VHS; tapes were ridiculously expensive and bulky, didn’t ship well, and didn’t store well.
The few series that were being sold on VHS hadn’t made all that much money.
Kamakiri: I’m curious about something. Do you realize this board is owned by a newspaper and that Cecil Adams makes money from selling books related to the articles he’s written for that newspaper? What kind of response would you expect on this board to copyright infringement?
If someone is intent on being sued into oblivion, there’s a lot to be said for hiring a bankruptcy lawyer to structure one’s estate well prior to the action, so as to protect as much as possible from the inevitable earth scorching.
Of course most folks who deliberately court a legal and financial disaster are not the sorts to seek legal protection for their assets in the first place.
They just struggle along, living in their own special world, unable to comprehend and unable to plan for reality.
I recently heard Danny Tedesco on the radio. He’s been trying to secure music rights for a documentary he made in 2008 about the Wrecking Crew. He said part of the problem is that music publishers and labels have sustained so many layoffs and have such turnover now that they essentially have no one left with the time, authority, and knowledge to renegotiate licensing fees for anyone who can’t pay their standard prices.
If Mr. Crumb knows that the clock is ticking on his exclusive rights to the character, would that not encourage creativity? Either to create something more with the character during this exclusivity, or create something new?
My personal view is that it encourages more creativity of you aren’t allowed to simply copy Mr. Natural but are allowed to use the same concepts to create a new character and setting.
I don’t care if Mickey Mouse stays under the control of Disney because Disney cannot control the idea of a cartoon mouse. There can be a Tom and Jerry and a Fievel and a Ratatouille.
I don’t care if Lestat stays under the control of Anne Rice because look at how many hundreds variations on vampire stories we now have.
I would argue that making it easy to copy Mr. Natural or Mickey Mouse or Lestat exactly would actually result in some degree of less creativity than we have now.
We have Anastasia and Christian because E.L. James was not allowed to make an exact copy of Bella and Edward.
That’s at least marginally more creative and the public benefits from something new without really being denied anything that’s very important in the big picture.
What treaty or international obligations are you referring to, Acsenray? The Berne Convention only requires a term of life plus 50 years. Signatories can create a longer term, as the US and the EU countries have done, but that’'s not required by Berne.
One relatively recent development is that there are now companies that handle clearing music rights. It used to be the studios had to do it on their own and they encountered difficulties tracking people down and working their way through the various ownership issues. But these specialized companies do it on a regular basis and are often originally from the music business so they know people and are more efficient.
Yes, but Google is doing their copying under the auspices of Fair Use, which allows copying and storing and archiving and scholarly annotations and parody and probably a few other things I forget because I haven’t had my caffeine yet.
Still a can of worms, but a totally different can than the one the OP will be dealing with.
As I said I think either 50 or 70 is a perfectly good number. To me the issue of harmonization is much more important than choosing between the two.
I don’t consider it a “high bar” because I don’t think it needs to be changed again. But if everyone goes along with 50, I’m good with that.
Of course u don’t demand literal unanimity, but a number that represents and overwhelming representation of places and people where American creative works are popular.
I don’t necessarily mind if desirable properties are kept exclusive, it’s more the massive numbers of works that are practically abandoned, and are laying fallow under what amounts to perpetual copyright.
For every Mickey Mouse, there are a hundred or a thousand properties that someone could do something fun with, and aren’t because of excessive copyright.
Take the OP, he’s filling a market need, people (a few at least) want this product, CBS isn’t filling the need, so the OP did. This idea that people want things that the IP owner doesn’t provide is often portrayed as selfish and childish, but it’s really the lynchpin of capitalism. Fulfilling the needs of the market.
If capitalism was based only on fulfilling “needs”, our entire economy would be based on providing food, clothing and shelter, and copyright wouldn’t exist because nothing copyrightable would have a place in our “need” based economy.
So let’s say CBS had a contract with Shatner that he would get 1% of the gross of that movie of the week. But CBS doesn’t put it on DVD because they don’t believe it is profitable to publish the DVD, and then write the necessary check to Shatner.
If someone steps in to publish the DVD themselves, do they owe anything to Shatner? Or does the fact that the producer indefinitely delays the DVD - perhaps forever - mean that the performers lose their contractual claim to compensation?
Even using that loose definition of “need,” I’d classify the need for entertainment of a specific type as a different sort of need from the “need” for access to a specific work.