Over The Counter Culture

News comes via ArsTechnica that the EU may be prepping a move to shift copyright protection up from the standard 50 years to a whopping 95 years. Why 95? Psychologically easier to stomach than a nice, round HUGE number like 100?

We’re seeing an incredible rebirth of the creative commons in society, an explosion in DIY creativity, often by people whose inspiration is not the basic act of creation but delivering incredible mashups and remixes. Why then seek to stifle this with even heavier copyright restrictions? Perhaps it’s a double bluff - make copyright even more onerous so that creators instead start looking at copyleft principles (espoused by Creative Commons, which I ardently support).

There’s no evidence that extending copyright would patch up our ailing music industry, which is currently going through very well-publicised hard times at the moment. Their problem is people who flaunt copyright - I dare say they’re more concerned about the next Arctic Monkeys album being pirated, than musicians in their old age not getting royalties from songs they performed ab initio or just covered over half a century ago (songwriters, meanwhile, are protected for life+70).

Intellectual property is not ostensibly about fairness, it’s about putting guarantees in place (of revenue stream protection) so that creative people have an incentive to create. Well, they have it. The music arena is no less fertile today than it was when these laws were last refined - the incentive to make a career out of music doesn’t seem to have affected anyone’s decision making in that regard. So what, exactly, needs shoring up? Is it just the pension plan of ageing rockstars and session players? I don’t mean to sound harsh but:

a) padding their pension has been their responsibility, and that of their state, for the duration of their working life

b) the incentive system to make a career out of music wasn’t 95 years of royalties, back when they started out; they’ve not been led down a creative path ‘fraudulently’. They chose it based on the knowledge that 50 years down the line (not 95), their work will fertilise that of another man’s.

c) If copyright is there to encourage creativity and progress, why seek to shut down DJs that sample, remix and mashup the oldies in ever newer and more original forms, blending avant-garde music with the music that laid the foundations for where we are now? Honestly, what’s the greater payoff - mashup culture, or an imagined longer-term financial incentive for people to become musicians? I have yet to see ANY evidence that increasing copyright periods actually affects that decision.

By the way, look at the title to this post again - you’ll notice a gentle wink at a more genuine musical muse than copyright legislation will ever be!

EDIT: The Register weighs in on the issue

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.