Regardless of what happens here, one of the biggest losses in historical music archives was when what.cd got taken down. Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings. I wish there was some sort of law protecting this. What.cd was clearly offending copyright, with the historical value being a secondary effect, but the internet archive's intent here clearly isn't copyright violation.
Yes, but it shouldn't have to. The youngest recordings we're talking about are ~65 years old. Few people even have gear to play the discs. Have the authors of these songs, the players on the recordings and the publishers of these discs not had enough of a chance to make their money? I'll take whatever judgement I can get in favor of the Internet Archive, but I think we should be aiming for a principled stance of enough copyright is enough!
IMO copyright simply isn’t fine grained enough. Allowing 1:1 copies after 20 years isn’t economically meaningful to the creators in general, but when you use a work as part of a movie, commercial, political campaign, etc it’s co opting the original creator as if they where endorsing what you’re doing. Which simply isn’t appropriate while the creator is alive.
On the other hand if you’re selling action figures you expect little kids to create their own stories with those characters. Culture has long mixed existing characters in new ways just look at any mythology before writing. Jokes, memes, fanfics, etc are the natural progression of a culture and giving up on that seems detrimental in ways that aren’t obvious.
I agree that we're probably giving up something culturally and socially important by restricting the telling and remixing of stories, myths, characters, etc. As for co-opting work to spread a message the author wouldn't necessarily endorse, that interpretation sounds like one borne of a world with strict copyright that has trained people to expect all instances of a character or uses of a work to involve the author's permission. In a world without such an expectation that sort of usage would not be misinterpreted as endorsement.
> that interpretation sounds like one borne of a world with strict copyright that has trained people to expect all instances of a character or uses of a work to involve the author's permission
I think rather it's borne of a world that views ideas as something to own, rather than something that you give to the world to enrich culture, arts, or sciences. There are people who desire perpetual copyright, and the eradication of the public domain. They see ideas as something they have a right to monetize until the end of time.
> In a world without such an expectation that sort of usage would not be misinterpreted as endorsement.
Memory is associative not some perfectly indexed logical deduction. Play a clip of something next to something else and people link them even if it doesn’t make any sense.
It’s not such a big issue of someone is using characters from a novel in a new context, but we’re also dealing with recordings and deepfakes. Make a minor edit to a song and play it in a commercial and many people would get confused as to what the original lyrics where.
Your distinction between commercial use and things like meme culture doesn’t hold up. For example, memes can harm creators too, like Pepe the Frog being co-opted by far-right groups. If you want to protect creators, there’s no simple solution, as both can distort their intent.
Focused on “commercial” and while ignoring “political campaign, etc” misses the point. There is a difference between making up a new Chuck Norris fact and using the meme to support religion, brands, politics, or whatever.
Legal systems constantly deal with intangible abstracts like intent. “Pepe the Frog being co-opted” is cashing in on the existing work rather than operating in some hypothetical framework.
Pepe wasn’t officially adopted by that campaign, and its misuse and harm began long before and continued well after the press tied it to MAGA.
Beyond that, creative works shape society, and arbitrarily restricting them stifles creativity. Granting exceptions for reasons like ‘think of the children’ or ‘it’s just for the lulz’ fails to address the greater issue.
> Pepe wasn’t officially adopted by that campaign, and its misuse and harm began long before and continued well after the press tied it to MAGA.
Being ‘Official’ is irrelevant. Noting happens without individuals doing something, who would then be liable in the system I am describing.
> Granting exceptions for
Exceptions completely defeat the point here. It’s the implied support that’s the problem not what’s being supported. Someone could be a well known champion of the issuing being supported, but disagree with being associated with the people presenting the message.
We limit what you can do with someone’s likeness and someone’s works deserve protection for similar reasons. Under the current system this issue is irrelevant because of how long copyright lasts, but if you want dramatically shorter copyright people are going to want this kind of protection even for works they aren’t receiving royalties from.
Copyright law isn’t written to be reasonable. It doesn’t matter if the rightsholder wrote a song 65 years ago and hasn’t made money selling it for decades, it’s protected for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. I’m sure everyone who comments on this would agree that’s far too long, but it doesn’t matter what we think. We could spend all day coming up with better ideas for how this could work, but the RIAA have no desire to budge on this at all, and there isn’t enough political will to overturn the current laws (all republicans and some democrats would oppose any attempt to do so).
"That" has a little wiggle room here, but the answer is still probably no regardless of what you mean. The Internet Archive's goal is to provide universal access to all knowledge. This is not the goal of the LOC.
"All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the copyright law (17 USC section 407).
This law requires that two copies of the best edition of every copyrightable work published in the United States be sent to the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress"
I don't know how/if it works in practice, but if the copyright is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", I think that it is perfectly fine for the LOC to guarantee that when the copyright expires at least a copy is still around.
This doesn't mean that it should provide universal access though, especially while the copyright is still valid.
I have no idea :-). Frankly I was under the impression that this requirement had been weakened/removed over the years, but this is what they write on the official website and I cannot find any reference about that so that's why I wrote "how/if it works in practice"
(maybe the devil is in the referenced details, but alas I have not time to investigate now)
But my point was more about the matter of principle: it is reasonable for the government to ask a copy of the works (for preservation reasons) in exchange for time-limited rights over it.
I mean, it certainly doesn't apply to 80 year-old 78s published long before the law said that. They don't go looking for ancient stuff that predated that practice.
The copyright office does not try to collect and preserve, en masse, old recordings from before they started taking deposits of audio recordings for copyright registration. (1972 prob? sound recordings didn't have federal copyright protection in the USA before 1972) There is no my knowledge no legislation authorizing that or funding from the government for it.
The Lib of Congress (probably not in the copyright office part of it) does have some historical audio recordings in their collection, including digitizations, but I don't think on this scale.
What.cd was more than an archive of nearly all recorded music, both analog and digital. It had some of the best collage lists and recommendations I have ever seen. None of the child sites came even close, but some are promising.
It was truly one of the best ways to discover music because behind each recommendation was a human that were both enthralled you were interested and would tailor their recommendations to suit your tastes.
Spotify use to have humans curate their playlists and during this time is was almost as good, but since they've moved to ML models recommendations have gone to truly awful now.
> Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings.
Does anyone have a link to such an index for what.cd? Just the following:
* album/track string plus minimal metadata (release date or whatever)
* hash for the track that goes along with that given piece of unique metadata
Such a thing is obviously on the right side of the law-- you can't reconstruct the copyrighted content from the hash or the title. And the name of an artist/track title isn't copyrightable.
That would be a valuable index that shows the exact state of what.cd's database before it was taken down. And I don't think it would be that large.
I'll never forgive the copyright monopolists for the closing of what.cd. The world lost another library of alexandria that day. Don't care what the law says, how many of their "rights" were infringed, how much money it was costing them. I'll never forgive them for it.
They can archive things without breaching copyright. Why not digitise your 78rpm copy of White Christmas, stick it in the vault, and publish it when the copyright expires?
There's always the possibility that the organization falls apart, suffers catastrophic data loss, or is legally compelled to destroy their copies. The name of the game is redundancy when it comes to archival, and the best way to achieve that is to distribute copies to anyone who wants one. Many parties storing copies on many mediums in many jurisdictions for many reasons.
Rather than have them be for fixed periods, have the registration fee increase quickly. Want a 5 year copyright? Sure $100 registration. Another 5 years? $1000. Another 5 years? $10,000.
This results in highly profitable media still being in copyright, but basically everything falls out somewhere close to the year 25 1m renewal mark, or soon after.
Also, you have to give a few master copies to the copyright authority, so that it's less likely for the media to become lost.
I think that for the person who suggested the idea, this would be considered success--creative products that aren't being actively used should revert to the commons.
But as a comment in a different thread suggested, I do think that we'd want something like this to be accompanied by a shift in how we think about copyright.
Right now, copyright is used for two broad reasons: 1) preventing unauthorized "commercial" use, and 2) preventing piracy.
Use 1 is broadly good but flawed in the current system. But use 2 is culture-killing and creativity-surpressing with current copyright lengths, a good example of which being the loss of what.cd.
The more I think about it, the more I think we need to separate the two uses, so that creative works are in the public domain by default after a short time for the purposes of private use and archival projects, but corporations are prohibited from using creative works they haven't paid for for commercial purposes on a much longer timescale.
On balance, copyright seems to restrict the public and benefit corporations, and ideally that would be inverted.
The US had to much looser copyright terms until it tried to align with the Berne Convention. So there are minimum copyright terms that the US must comply by. US only joined the Berne Convention in 1989.
I don’t see any value in expiring Trademark. What’s the public benefit there?
Five years is a bit too short. Maybe five years automatic and then require renewals up to 25 years. It’d be good to have different terms for different types of things: software should be shorter, films or books should be longer terms.
They’re “good” because they’re associated with a company or product people are positive about. How does it help me if the trademark expires on a brand I like and ten other companies push out similar but not the same product? All the IP expired, so they use identical names, art, etc. How do customers distinguish?
Mark Twain had a lot to say about copyright. One of his arguments was that if he worked hard and built a business it would help support his children & descendants for, perhaps, generations. But he was an author and creator and felt that all of his hard labor should be able to support his family after his death. iuf Copyright was only 5 or 10 years then when it expires any publisher could print a artists books or recordings or whatnot... suddenly creators lose access to all royalty income and some dirtbag publisher is collecting all of the coin. Copyright might be inconvenient for some but for many others it is essential to making even a modest income.
> One of his arguments was that if he worked hard and built a business it would help support his children & descendants for, perhaps, generations. But he was an author and creator and felt that all of his hard labor should be able to support his family after his death.
You'd have to be seriously arrogant to believe that your labour should support multiple generations of your family.
Why? Shouldn't that be the dream for anyone with a family, and is indeed the case for many people?
I don't have any copyrights or trademarks or anything, but if I did I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo who only wants to use my work to pad their own wallets.
> I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo
Those aren't the only two options. If your copyright expired after a few years, your work would simply go into public domain, freely accessible to anyone. (The ones to "reap its benefits" at that point would be the general public.)
> Why?
The amount of money a single person spends throughout their lifetime generally orientates itself on the amount of money a single person earns throughout their lifetime. (We earn significantly more than 50 years ago, but we also spend a lot more, because our standards rose accordingly.)
If you expect your money to support the lives of multiple people (generations even), you are implying that your labour is worth multiple times as much as the labour of others. That is arrogant.
(I don't claim it should be actively prevented to make such large amounts of money. But we shouldn't legally limit people's access to literature just so a few authors can create a dynasty.)
Why should trademarks expire? If I'm doing business as Bob's Company, and I spend 15 years building up my good name and it's known for doing quality work, why should someone be able to come in and claim that they're also Bob's Company, just because some time has passed?
Why should companies live forever? If they have 'personhood' then they need to die at some point... otherwise we have cancerous monstrosities we see currently. That is what happens when any component of something larger (society) lives too long, hogging resources while killing the host.
20 years for trademark is negotiable. That there needs to be an expiration date is not.
As somebody who buys products, perpetual trademarks are useful to me. I want to know who I'm buying from.
The problem I have is with trademarks being used as nouns but somehow not becoming generic. I searched "Velcro" on Amazon.co.uk. The best selling item is Velcro branded "Stick On". What even is a "stick on"? No reasonable consumer would identify that as a hook and loop fastener without context. "Hook and loop" isn't even written on the front of the packaging. The "Velcro" trademark is clearly functioning as a noun, which means from an ethical point of view it should be generic.
>As somebody who buys products, perpetual trademarks are useful to me. I want to know who I'm buying from.
You are a mark; you are a rube; you have been rooked. there is absolutely nothing about a trademark that remotely implies a continuity of ownership, certainly not of production quality. see what happened to pyrex, brand loyalty to their trademark from rubes is the only thing going for them any more
Most companies don’t live forever. But I don’t see any value in having a mandatory expiration for trademark, and several downsides. If the TM expires on a popular brand of beer, for example, then there will be competitors flooding the market with other beers that may or may not actually have the same taste or quality. How does that benefit the public? It sounds more punitive against companies than positive for the public.
It sounds like the only companies you are familiar with are ones large enough to capture markets, bribe politicians, and write regulations in their favor.
Well, small and mid-size businesses are easy to miss if you work from home or live in a big city. They don't wield anything like the kind of power you describe. But they account for most of the US GDP and private sector jobs. You may want to stop and consider the value of multi-generational family-owned businesses.
Next up: suing NASA for the recordings on the Voyagers' golden records?
It's not as though the record labels themselves have ever shown an inclination to take on this monumental task as a way of thanking the hundreds of artists and the millions of fans that enriched them.
I feel like the Internet Archive and Murfie are opposite sides of the same coin with our efforts for digitization and access. But Murfie has a completely different approach from a copyright and financial perspective.
So far, the Internet Archive has done more good in the short term than I have with Murfie, but I can't help but feel like their lax approach to copyright law will do more harm for us all in the long run.
Sometimes I imagine how historians in 1000 years will view our world of today. It is a funny thought that they might perceive our world like someone that only consumes indy art, because all commercial art will have been lost.
A related thought is that we probably will never reach the level of durability and redundancy of CDs and DVDs again ever.
>A related thought is that we probably will never reach the level of durability and redundancy of CDs and DVDs again ever.
This might be true for mass media, strong maybe, but it’s absolutely not true in general. You could use a laser cutter to cut holes in a glass or gold plate or something, if you extrapolate that to the far future you could imagine it would be something the average person could achieve in their home much like 3d printing is easily accessible now. Dvds after all are not that robust, they have long term issues.
It's interesting that out of the 400k+ recordings they digitized, only 4142 are claimed as infringements. And it makes sense if everything they digitized is in an old format that went out of favor by the 50s. I think you could argue that NO recording this old should still be under copyright, it should all be in the public domain, or at least subject to archival even if you can't stream it online in one or two clicks.
It's illustrative of the fact that the RIAA would rather throw away 99% of its history than give up whatever little bit of juice is left today in the remaining 1%. It's not like they care to archive this stuff themselves; like the article says, they already needed to rely on collectors to give them recordings for a Robert Johnson re-release, and that was in the 1961.
Maybe it's their legal prerogative, but I'm of the mindset that if they are doing no good, at least do no harm.
Artificial scarcity is good for business. When the old stuff disappears, the new one sells better.
As an example, I recently started listening to eurobeat. I looked at Wikipedia and found that there is a CD series called "Super Eurobeat", which already published 250 volumes, containing about dozen songs each. Think about this again -- there are about 3000 songs, all of them already selected as "best of", just from one genre I previously didn't know about. Given that I don't spend much time listening to music, it might take me more than a year to listen to all of them; and after that point, I would be happy to start from the beginning again. So, from my perspective, it is not necessary to make new music, ever. And if we lived in the kind of world where copyright expires let's say after 14 years, most of that would even be legally free. And the same is probably true for most other genres.
Ok, this is extreme. New things are cool. But the more you are aware of the good old things that exist, the more work it takes to impress you. You will still be impressed with great new things, but much less with average new things, especially if they are expensive. And I suspect that the average new things make the largest part of the sales.
Well... for me "New Music" is anything I haven't heard before... there is a lot of amazing stuff recorded over the past 150 years. and so much of it is still "New!"
My favorite comment from the article was from the Hollywood/media exec lamenting that what IA was doing was 'theft'.
Didn't Hollywood come about from people trying to outrun Edison and his patents?
The hubris is astounding.
Pretty sure he's talking about the way things should be, not the way things are. The way things should be: None of this would be a problem. The way things are: Brewster Kahle is jeopardizing the archive's mission with his cavalier attitude towards copyright that is causing the archive to lose lawsuit after lawsuit. While fighting bad law is certainly a good thing, maybe imperiling the archive in the process is not. Unfortunately, such nuanced takes seem to be lost on people who treat these issues as a form of team sports and demand you either be simply pro- or anti-.
Agreed - but societal interests are a mix of the constituents within the society which can be in conflict as a well as the overall society as a whole. We want to protect the rule of law, both legal and social norms surrounding property rights, we want to enable the free expression and production of cultural goods, we want to ensure artists can profit off their work. My take is that amongst people discussing this there is a rough agreement that IP rights (both copywrite and patents) should be weakened at least in duration, but no consensus on the specifics, and their is a concentrated lobby of rights holders that wants to maintain their legal ability extract rents from their collections. We wouldn't be served well be crashing the whole system (not implying the parent comment suggested this) but that means we need to figure out how to change things at the margin within the current political climate. One compromise I've been trying to push is to require payment to continue to maintain the exclusivity. Shorten the default timeframes, but require fees to relicense the material. Perhaps we could also require that the material get sent to an archive as part of this to ensure it kept (at the right's holders expense). If the LoC isn't up to it, they could authorize third parties. Make the fees higher (and increase them over time) to disincentivize extension of everything. This tradeoff means that the biggest properties - Disney films say - do get long extensions, but that doesn't lock up everything else. Same thing with patents. Also we can get more creative with mandatory licensing. The main innovation here is to stop making the cutoff such a hard boundary which makes things more contentious.
I've seen you say this multiple times but it makes no sense. Disney can get copyrights as long as they want, essentially, small time authors get little to no protection? This is even more entrenched. It doesn't even make any sense in the patent context because they all have very limited terms anyway. It's like a fun armchair quarterback sort of idea, but it's not going to get you very far in an actual game.
An American would have to argue this while running for office, and then argue it in Congress. Alternatively, get a position to exploit the "copyright exception" provisions.
Or like most laws, an interested group find a way to get an audience with lawmakers to brief them on their concerns, help build consensus amongst their peers and staffers, and after work in non-publicized committees the main the details of the law get tacked onto some bigger bill and passed. Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics.
>Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics.
This must be why life keeps getting better and better for Americans each year!
> “For LPs and CDs, that’s exactly what we do,” he says. “Seventy-eights, we asked around, we dealt with a lot of collectors, they just said it’s not a problem.” (In an email, Kahle further notes that the Great 78 Project “predates the MMA” and that the “record labels knew about it.”)
> But there’s an even more blunt, obvious way of asking this question that doesn’t require knowledge of byzantine U.S. copyright law. Why didn’t the Internet Archive just think twice before making a song like “The Frim Fram Sauce” or Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” — the most popular single of all time — available online for free? There wasn’t any concern about even a Frank Sinatra hit on 78?
> For a few moments, it’s just the hearty horns of Bob Haggart and His Orchestra. “It wasn’t a problem,” Kahle says after a beat. “We talked to people, it wasn’t a problem.”
Seriously? Like, why not do this in a responsible way instead of a way that is going to create bad case law?
The irony that copyright is meant to induce "creativity" now spurs on less and less by tightly controlling the flow of information/inspiration. It locks people into less and less creative avenues, doing the exact opposite. Limited to lifetime of author. Publishers and contracted "rights holders" should not be allowed to continue to pursue/extort profits after the death of the author. I am being simplistic here and recognize there's room for nuance, but it's so damn obvious we have a situation far unlike what "the founders" intended (even though I'm not a fan of a lot of said founders for many reasons - this is one I can understand and relate to).
Should the government ever enforce copyright violations? That’s kind of the status quo for the vast vast majority of infractions. Even though enforcement could be trivial.
No, not in a direct sense anyway. It should be a tort. The government should assist with enforcement of court ordered actions like seizure of property or liens for non-payment however.
Regardless of what happens here, one of the biggest losses in historical music archives was when what.cd got taken down. Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings. I wish there was some sort of law protecting this. What.cd was clearly offending copyright, with the historical value being a secondary effect, but the internet archive's intent here clearly isn't copyright violation.
Intent should matter.
Yes, but it shouldn't have to. The youngest recordings we're talking about are ~65 years old. Few people even have gear to play the discs. Have the authors of these songs, the players on the recordings and the publishers of these discs not had enough of a chance to make their money? I'll take whatever judgement I can get in favor of the Internet Archive, but I think we should be aiming for a principled stance of enough copyright is enough!
IMO copyright simply isn’t fine grained enough. Allowing 1:1 copies after 20 years isn’t economically meaningful to the creators in general, but when you use a work as part of a movie, commercial, political campaign, etc it’s co opting the original creator as if they where endorsing what you’re doing. Which simply isn’t appropriate while the creator is alive.
On the other hand if you’re selling action figures you expect little kids to create their own stories with those characters. Culture has long mixed existing characters in new ways just look at any mythology before writing. Jokes, memes, fanfics, etc are the natural progression of a culture and giving up on that seems detrimental in ways that aren’t obvious.
I agree that we're probably giving up something culturally and socially important by restricting the telling and remixing of stories, myths, characters, etc. As for co-opting work to spread a message the author wouldn't necessarily endorse, that interpretation sounds like one borne of a world with strict copyright that has trained people to expect all instances of a character or uses of a work to involve the author's permission. In a world without such an expectation that sort of usage would not be misinterpreted as endorsement.
> that interpretation sounds like one borne of a world with strict copyright that has trained people to expect all instances of a character or uses of a work to involve the author's permission
I think rather it's borne of a world that views ideas as something to own, rather than something that you give to the world to enrich culture, arts, or sciences. There are people who desire perpetual copyright, and the eradication of the public domain. They see ideas as something they have a right to monetize until the end of time.
Ideas and recordings of performances are separate things.
Someone may want to abolish copyright on books and still desire control over a sex tape they made 50 years ago.
> In a world without such an expectation that sort of usage would not be misinterpreted as endorsement.
Memory is associative not some perfectly indexed logical deduction. Play a clip of something next to something else and people link them even if it doesn’t make any sense.
It’s not such a big issue of someone is using characters from a novel in a new context, but we’re also dealing with recordings and deepfakes. Make a minor edit to a song and play it in a commercial and many people would get confused as to what the original lyrics where.
Your distinction between commercial use and things like meme culture doesn’t hold up. For example, memes can harm creators too, like Pepe the Frog being co-opted by far-right groups. If you want to protect creators, there’s no simple solution, as both can distort their intent.
Focused on “commercial” and while ignoring “political campaign, etc” misses the point. There is a difference between making up a new Chuck Norris fact and using the meme to support religion, brands, politics, or whatever.
Legal systems constantly deal with intangible abstracts like intent. “Pepe the Frog being co-opted” is cashing in on the existing work rather than operating in some hypothetical framework.
Pepe wasn’t officially adopted by that campaign, and its misuse and harm began long before and continued well after the press tied it to MAGA.
Beyond that, creative works shape society, and arbitrarily restricting them stifles creativity. Granting exceptions for reasons like ‘think of the children’ or ‘it’s just for the lulz’ fails to address the greater issue.
> Pepe wasn’t officially adopted by that campaign, and its misuse and harm began long before and continued well after the press tied it to MAGA.
Being ‘Official’ is irrelevant. Noting happens without individuals doing something, who would then be liable in the system I am describing.
> Granting exceptions for
Exceptions completely defeat the point here. It’s the implied support that’s the problem not what’s being supported. Someone could be a well known champion of the issuing being supported, but disagree with being associated with the people presenting the message.
We limit what you can do with someone’s likeness and someone’s works deserve protection for similar reasons. Under the current system this issue is irrelevant because of how long copyright lasts, but if you want dramatically shorter copyright people are going to want this kind of protection even for works they aren’t receiving royalties from.
Copyright law isn’t written to be reasonable. It doesn’t matter if the rightsholder wrote a song 65 years ago and hasn’t made money selling it for decades, it’s protected for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. I’m sure everyone who comments on this would agree that’s far too long, but it doesn’t matter what we think. We could spend all day coming up with better ideas for how this could work, but the RIAA have no desire to budge on this at all, and there isn’t enough political will to overturn the current laws (all republicans and some democrats would oppose any attempt to do so).
> The youngest recordings we're talking about are ~65 years old.
So they could have gotten some value again as relics?
remember when they tried to codify it into an international treaty, effectively removing even congress' ability to control it?
Isn't that supposed to be the role of The Library of Congress?
"That" has a little wiggle room here, but the answer is still probably no regardless of what you mean. The Internet Archive's goal is to provide universal access to all knowledge. This is not the goal of the LOC.
I think the parent refers to this [1]:
"All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the copyright law (17 USC section 407).
This law requires that two copies of the best edition of every copyrightable work published in the United States be sent to the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress"
I don't know how/if it works in practice, but if the copyright is supposed "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", I think that it is perfectly fine for the LOC to guarantee that when the copyright expires at least a copy is still around.
This doesn't mean that it should provide universal access though, especially while the copyright is still valid.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/
Wait, does this apply to software?
I have no idea :-). Frankly I was under the impression that this requirement had been weakened/removed over the years, but this is what they write on the official website and I cannot find any reference about that so that's why I wrote "how/if it works in practice"
(maybe the devil is in the referenced details, but alas I have not time to investigate now)
But my point was more about the matter of principle: it is reasonable for the government to ask a copy of the works (for preservation reasons) in exchange for time-limited rights over it.
I mean, it certainly doesn't apply to 80 year-old 78s published long before the law said that. They don't go looking for ancient stuff that predated that practice.
Supposed according to whom?
Believe it or not, the official role of the Library of Congress is mostly to be a library serving Congress.
Their website says "The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office."
They do keep copies of things registered for copyrights, for copyright purposes.
I don't believe there is any legislation or funding to give them the role of finding and preserving 80 year old 78s en masse.
The Copyright Office is and always has been an arm of the Library of Congress.
So “supposed according to whom” is according to law and all of history.
The copyright office does not try to collect and preserve, en masse, old recordings from before they started taking deposits of audio recordings for copyright registration. (1972 prob? sound recordings didn't have federal copyright protection in the USA before 1972) There is no my knowledge no legislation authorizing that or funding from the government for it.
The Lib of Congress (probably not in the copyright office part of it) does have some historical audio recordings in their collection, including digitizations, but I don't think on this scale.
What.cd was more than an archive of nearly all recorded music, both analog and digital. It had some of the best collage lists and recommendations I have ever seen. None of the child sites came even close, but some are promising.
It was truly one of the best ways to discover music because behind each recommendation was a human that were both enthralled you were interested and would tailor their recommendations to suit your tastes.
Spotify use to have humans curate their playlists and during this time is was almost as good, but since they've moved to ML models recommendations have gone to truly awful now.
> Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings.
Does anyone have a link to such an index for what.cd? Just the following:
* album/track string plus minimal metadata (release date or whatever)
* hash for the track that goes along with that given piece of unique metadata
Such a thing is obviously on the right side of the law-- you can't reconstruct the copyrighted content from the hash or the title. And the name of an artist/track title isn't copyrightable.
That would be a valuable index that shows the exact state of what.cd's database before it was taken down. And I don't think it would be that large.
This might be what you're looking for: https://archive.org/details/What.CD_Goodbye_Release
I'll never forgive the copyright monopolists for the closing of what.cd. The world lost another library of alexandria that day. Don't care what the law says, how many of their "rights" were infringed, how much money it was costing them. I'll never forgive them for it.
Me either, the alternatives that sprung up just aren't the same.
They can archive things without breaching copyright. Why not digitise your 78rpm copy of White Christmas, stick it in the vault, and publish it when the copyright expires?
There's always the possibility that the organization falls apart, suffers catastrophic data loss, or is legally compelled to destroy their copies. The name of the game is redundancy when it comes to archival, and the best way to achieve that is to distribute copies to anyone who wants one. Many parties storing copies on many mediums in many jurisdictions for many reasons.
intent doesn't matter and both what.cd and internet archive are unambiguously a public good, grow the fuck up
If I amass any kind of political power: I'd set copyright for a maximum of 5 years, patents for 10 years, trademarks for 20.
It would kickstart innovation, settle fair use of training data, and protect the internet archive.
On the downside: companies (not artists) would make a bit less rent-style income.
So even the downside is a win, in my book.
Rather than have them be for fixed periods, have the registration fee increase quickly. Want a 5 year copyright? Sure $100 registration. Another 5 years? $1000. Another 5 years? $10,000.
This results in highly profitable media still being in copyright, but basically everything falls out somewhere close to the year 25 1m renewal mark, or soon after.
Also, you have to give a few master copies to the copyright authority, so that it's less likely for the media to become lost.
That model would exclude all of the businesses that aren’t profitable or hold the patent for reasons that aren’t money related.
I think a lot of people would consider it unfair
I think that for the person who suggested the idea, this would be considered success--creative products that aren't being actively used should revert to the commons.
But as a comment in a different thread suggested, I do think that we'd want something like this to be accompanied by a shift in how we think about copyright.
Right now, copyright is used for two broad reasons: 1) preventing unauthorized "commercial" use, and 2) preventing piracy.
Use 1 is broadly good but flawed in the current system. But use 2 is culture-killing and creativity-surpressing with current copyright lengths, a good example of which being the loss of what.cd.
The more I think about it, the more I think we need to separate the two uses, so that creative works are in the public domain by default after a short time for the purposes of private use and archival projects, but corporations are prohibited from using creative works they haven't paid for for commercial purposes on a much longer timescale.
On balance, copyright seems to restrict the public and benefit corporations, and ideally that would be inverted.
what's the downside here?
People who have more money can keep longer copyrights easier. That's the problem.
if they're making enough money off of it that they can afford the fees, then it's working as intended.
Like.what. I hear this a lot but not much way of real examples.
You hold on to.copyright of.a song you sang when you were 8 and isnt making any money? So what ?
The US had to much looser copyright terms until it tried to align with the Berne Convention. So there are minimum copyright terms that the US must comply by. US only joined the Berne Convention in 1989.
https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2021/05/13/why-did-the-unite...
Excellent point. To which I point out: we have exited various agreements before.
I don’t see any value in expiring Trademark. What’s the public benefit there?
Five years is a bit too short. Maybe five years automatic and then require renewals up to 25 years. It’d be good to have different terms for different types of things: software should be shorter, films or books should be longer terms.
All the good names get locked up forever?
Trademarks have to be renewed already. Why make them eternal?
They’re “good” because they’re associated with a company or product people are positive about. How does it help me if the trademark expires on a brand I like and ten other companies push out similar but not the same product? All the IP expired, so they use identical names, art, etc. How do customers distinguish?
Right, that's why they expire. I was asking why some appear to want eternal TMs
Mark Twain had a lot to say about copyright. One of his arguments was that if he worked hard and built a business it would help support his children & descendants for, perhaps, generations. But he was an author and creator and felt that all of his hard labor should be able to support his family after his death. iuf Copyright was only 5 or 10 years then when it expires any publisher could print a artists books or recordings or whatnot... suddenly creators lose access to all royalty income and some dirtbag publisher is collecting all of the coin. Copyright might be inconvenient for some but for many others it is essential to making even a modest income.
> One of his arguments was that if he worked hard and built a business it would help support his children & descendants for, perhaps, generations. But he was an author and creator and felt that all of his hard labor should be able to support his family after his death.
You'd have to be seriously arrogant to believe that your labour should support multiple generations of your family.
Why? Shouldn't that be the dream for anyone with a family, and is indeed the case for many people?
I don't have any copyrights or trademarks or anything, but if I did I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo who only wants to use my work to pad their own wallets.
> I'd much rather my family be the one reaping its benefits when I die rather than some soulless corpo
Those aren't the only two options. If your copyright expired after a few years, your work would simply go into public domain, freely accessible to anyone. (The ones to "reap its benefits" at that point would be the general public.)
> Why?
The amount of money a single person spends throughout their lifetime generally orientates itself on the amount of money a single person earns throughout their lifetime. (We earn significantly more than 50 years ago, but we also spend a lot more, because our standards rose accordingly.)
If you expect your money to support the lives of multiple people (generations even), you are implying that your labour is worth multiple times as much as the labour of others. That is arrogant.
(I don't claim it should be actively prevented to make such large amounts of money. But we shouldn't legally limit people's access to literature just so a few authors can create a dynasty.)
Why should trademarks expire? If I'm doing business as Bob's Company, and I spend 15 years building up my good name and it's known for doing quality work, why should someone be able to come in and claim that they're also Bob's Company, just because some time has passed?
Why should companies live forever? If they have 'personhood' then they need to die at some point... otherwise we have cancerous monstrosities we see currently. That is what happens when any component of something larger (society) lives too long, hogging resources while killing the host.
20 years for trademark is negotiable. That there needs to be an expiration date is not.
As somebody who buys products, perpetual trademarks are useful to me. I want to know who I'm buying from.
The problem I have is with trademarks being used as nouns but somehow not becoming generic. I searched "Velcro" on Amazon.co.uk. The best selling item is Velcro branded "Stick On". What even is a "stick on"? No reasonable consumer would identify that as a hook and loop fastener without context. "Hook and loop" isn't even written on the front of the packaging. The "Velcro" trademark is clearly functioning as a noun, which means from an ethical point of view it should be generic.
>As somebody who buys products, perpetual trademarks are useful to me. I want to know who I'm buying from.
You are a mark; you are a rube; you have been rooked. there is absolutely nothing about a trademark that remotely implies a continuity of ownership, certainly not of production quality. see what happened to pyrex, brand loyalty to their trademark from rubes is the only thing going for them any more
If there were no trademarks you wouldn't even know this happened.
Most companies don’t live forever. But I don’t see any value in having a mandatory expiration for trademark, and several downsides. If the TM expires on a popular brand of beer, for example, then there will be competitors flooding the market with other beers that may or may not actually have the same taste or quality. How does that benefit the public? It sounds more punitive against companies than positive for the public.
It sounds like the only companies you are familiar with are ones large enough to capture markets, bribe politicians, and write regulations in their favor.
Well, small and mid-size businesses are easy to miss if you work from home or live in a big city. They don't wield anything like the kind of power you describe. But they account for most of the US GDP and private sector jobs. You may want to stop and consider the value of multi-generational family-owned businesses.
>But they account for most of the US GDP and private sector jobs.
wrong again, small businesses do not account for even 45% of US gdp. sorry to hear your jet ski rental isn't doing well
I think it's absurd that patents are so short lived compared to copyright.
Cool, now work through the impact of 5 year copyright on open source licenses.
It would explode as public domain works accumulate?
Next up: suing NASA for the recordings on the Voyagers' golden records?
It's not as though the record labels themselves have ever shown an inclination to take on this monumental task as a way of thanking the hundreds of artists and the millions of fans that enriched them.
https://archive.ph/85JPm
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I just checked it again with the cache cleared and it works fine (for me). If you could be specific about what way it "does not work" ...
I think archive.ph blocks some DNS resolvers(cloudflare, maybe others?) because the operator doesn't like how cloud flare protects user privacy.
I feel like the Internet Archive and Murfie are opposite sides of the same coin with our efforts for digitization and access. But Murfie has a completely different approach from a copyright and financial perspective.
So far, the Internet Archive has done more good in the short term than I have with Murfie, but I can't help but feel like their lax approach to copyright law will do more harm for us all in the long run.
Sometimes I imagine how historians in 1000 years will view our world of today. It is a funny thought that they might perceive our world like someone that only consumes indy art, because all commercial art will have been lost.
A related thought is that we probably will never reach the level of durability and redundancy of CDs and DVDs again ever.
>A related thought is that we probably will never reach the level of durability and redundancy of CDs and DVDs again ever.
This might be true for mass media, strong maybe, but it’s absolutely not true in general. You could use a laser cutter to cut holes in a glass or gold plate or something, if you extrapolate that to the far future you could imagine it would be something the average person could achieve in their home much like 3d printing is easily accessible now. Dvds after all are not that robust, they have long term issues.
Sure, technology has advanced and we certainly could make something with higher durability and redundancy.
But why would we do that?
My point is that the reasons for CDs and DVDs happening do not exist anymore and will never come back.
It's interesting that out of the 400k+ recordings they digitized, only 4142 are claimed as infringements. And it makes sense if everything they digitized is in an old format that went out of favor by the 50s. I think you could argue that NO recording this old should still be under copyright, it should all be in the public domain, or at least subject to archival even if you can't stream it online in one or two clicks.
It's illustrative of the fact that the RIAA would rather throw away 99% of its history than give up whatever little bit of juice is left today in the remaining 1%. It's not like they care to archive this stuff themselves; like the article says, they already needed to rely on collectors to give them recordings for a Robert Johnson re-release, and that was in the 1961.
Maybe it's their legal prerogative, but I'm of the mindset that if they are doing no good, at least do no harm.
Artificial scarcity is good for business. When the old stuff disappears, the new one sells better.
As an example, I recently started listening to eurobeat. I looked at Wikipedia and found that there is a CD series called "Super Eurobeat", which already published 250 volumes, containing about dozen songs each. Think about this again -- there are about 3000 songs, all of them already selected as "best of", just from one genre I previously didn't know about. Given that I don't spend much time listening to music, it might take me more than a year to listen to all of them; and after that point, I would be happy to start from the beginning again. So, from my perspective, it is not necessary to make new music, ever. And if we lived in the kind of world where copyright expires let's say after 14 years, most of that would even be legally free. And the same is probably true for most other genres.
Ok, this is extreme. New things are cool. But the more you are aware of the good old things that exist, the more work it takes to impress you. You will still be impressed with great new things, but much less with average new things, especially if they are expensive. And I suspect that the average new things make the largest part of the sales.
Well... for me "New Music" is anything I haven't heard before... there is a lot of amazing stuff recorded over the past 150 years. and so much of it is still "New!"
My favorite comment from the article was from the Hollywood/media exec lamenting that what IA was doing was 'theft'. Didn't Hollywood come about from people trying to outrun Edison and his patents? The hubris is astounding.
Time to lay RIAA to rest. A message needs to be sent: orgs that go after archival efforts like this get smote to death.
RICO statutes! Sic em boys!
> I think you could argue that NO recording this old should still be under copyright
In a court of law? Not seriously nor credibly. The term of a copyright is provided for by statute.
Pretty sure he's talking about the way things should be, not the way things are. The way things should be: None of this would be a problem. The way things are: Brewster Kahle is jeopardizing the archive's mission with his cavalier attitude towards copyright that is causing the archive to lose lawsuit after lawsuit. While fighting bad law is certainly a good thing, maybe imperiling the archive in the process is not. Unfortunately, such nuanced takes seem to be lost on people who treat these issues as a form of team sports and demand you either be simply pro- or anti-.
> While fighting bad law is certainly a good thing ...
... you still require a winning strategy and winning execution, or you've only done harm.
...which is precisely the point of the other half of the sentence you snipped:
> maybe imperiling the archive in the process is not.
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> Pretty sure he's talking about the way things should be, not the way things are.
Well, I made my distinction, which you clearly read and were aware of but made this post anyway.
.....I mean, clearly someone was confused by what you said, and I took it as an opportunity to make my own point. I don't really see a problem.
On the other hand, we constructed the court of law to help society, not the other way around. Same goes for statutes.
Agreed - but societal interests are a mix of the constituents within the society which can be in conflict as a well as the overall society as a whole. We want to protect the rule of law, both legal and social norms surrounding property rights, we want to enable the free expression and production of cultural goods, we want to ensure artists can profit off their work. My take is that amongst people discussing this there is a rough agreement that IP rights (both copywrite and patents) should be weakened at least in duration, but no consensus on the specifics, and their is a concentrated lobby of rights holders that wants to maintain their legal ability extract rents from their collections. We wouldn't be served well be crashing the whole system (not implying the parent comment suggested this) but that means we need to figure out how to change things at the margin within the current political climate. One compromise I've been trying to push is to require payment to continue to maintain the exclusivity. Shorten the default timeframes, but require fees to relicense the material. Perhaps we could also require that the material get sent to an archive as part of this to ensure it kept (at the right's holders expense). If the LoC isn't up to it, they could authorize third parties. Make the fees higher (and increase them over time) to disincentivize extension of everything. This tradeoff means that the biggest properties - Disney films say - do get long extensions, but that doesn't lock up everything else. Same thing with patents. Also we can get more creative with mandatory licensing. The main innovation here is to stop making the cutoff such a hard boundary which makes things more contentious.
I've seen you say this multiple times but it makes no sense. Disney can get copyrights as long as they want, essentially, small time authors get little to no protection? This is even more entrenched. It doesn't even make any sense in the patent context because they all have very limited terms anyway. It's like a fun armchair quarterback sort of idea, but it's not going to get you very far in an actual game.
An American would have to argue this while running for office, and then argue it in Congress. Alternatively, get a position to exploit the "copyright exception" provisions.
Or like most laws, an interested group find a way to get an audience with lawmakers to brief them on their concerns, help build consensus amongst their peers and staffers, and after work in non-publicized committees the main the details of the law get tacked onto some bigger bill and passed. Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics.
>Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics.
This must be why life keeps getting better and better for Americans each year!
It's a congressional law like any other congressional law. Needs to be passed by the house and the senate.
One step closer to me listening to public domain-only music if I could help it.
> “For LPs and CDs, that’s exactly what we do,” he says. “Seventy-eights, we asked around, we dealt with a lot of collectors, they just said it’s not a problem.” (In an email, Kahle further notes that the Great 78 Project “predates the MMA” and that the “record labels knew about it.”)
> But there’s an even more blunt, obvious way of asking this question that doesn’t require knowledge of byzantine U.S. copyright law. Why didn’t the Internet Archive just think twice before making a song like “The Frim Fram Sauce” or Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” — the most popular single of all time — available online for free? There wasn’t any concern about even a Frank Sinatra hit on 78?
> For a few moments, it’s just the hearty horns of Bob Haggart and His Orchestra. “It wasn’t a problem,” Kahle says after a beat. “We talked to people, it wasn’t a problem.”
Seriously? Like, why not do this in a responsible way instead of a way that is going to create bad case law?
Work for hire copyright duration of 95 years (from publishing) or 120 years from creation is outrageous.
I just donated money to the Internet Archive.
The irony that copyright is meant to induce "creativity" now spurs on less and less by tightly controlling the flow of information/inspiration. It locks people into less and less creative avenues, doing the exact opposite. Limited to lifetime of author. Publishers and contracted "rights holders" should not be allowed to continue to pursue/extort profits after the death of the author. I am being simplistic here and recognize there's room for nuance, but it's so damn obvious we have a situation far unlike what "the founders" intended (even though I'm not a fan of a lot of said founders for many reasons - this is one I can understand and relate to).
Should the government ever enforce copyright violations? That’s kind of the status quo for the vast vast majority of infractions. Even though enforcement could be trivial.
No, not in a direct sense anyway. It should be a tort. The government should assist with enforcement of court ordered actions like seizure of property or liens for non-payment however.
> No, not in a direct sense anyway. It should be a tort.
For any particularly good reason, other than, "piracy is a cultural norm?" Kind of tautological.