[Fsfe-ie] McCreevy wants 95 year copyright

[Fergal Daly]

On 15/02/2008, Ciaran O'Riordan <ciaran at fsfe.org> wrote:
>
>  http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/14/business/EU-FIN-EU-Music-Royalties.php
>
>  As European Commissioner for Internal Market, McCreevy wants to extend
>  copyright from 50 years to 95 years.  His reason?  People are now living
>  longer.
>
>  You couldn't make it up.  He says he wants to ensure that teen artists can
>  rely on their work providing them a pension.
>
>  Trying to cast this as supporting the little guy, he says that it will
>  support session musicians who played backing music.
>
>  He also talks about increasing the taxes on blank media.  This is something
>  I think we could agree to.  There's lots of room for arguing about the
>  numbers and how to distribute the collected taxes, but as systems go, this
>  one doesn't harm people's rights to help themselves or to help others.
>
>  This is probably related to the EC's public consultation on "Creative
>  Content Online", which has a deadline of Feb 29th:
>  http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/other_actions/content_online/index_en.htm
>
>  I'm going to look into that early next week and will discuss it here.  It
>  might be something worth drafting an IFSO response to.

The aricle is pretty bizarre. McCreevy says about the singers

"These royalties are often their sole pension."

The royalties don't currently exist so anybody who expects them to be
their pension is not living in reality. It's a bit like me saying that
company X will be my sole pension, despite the fact that they don't
have a pension scheme. There is no obligation on company X to suddenly
produce this pension scheme for me just because I'm an idiot.

The other thing I thought was hilarious was

"McCreevy said the new rules should not increase consumer prices
because the price of records out of copyright is often the same as —
or higher than — that of newly released discs."

If that's not a spectacular failure of the free market and copyright
law then I don't know what is. When copyright expires it's _supposed_
to make the works more available to the public. He says this isn't
happening but instead of trying to fix this he uses this failure as an
excuse to guarantee that the works will not be freed up,

F

>
>  --
>  Ciarán O'Riordan (+32 477 36 44 19) \ Support Free Software and GNU/Linux
>  http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \     Join FSFE's Fellowship:
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