At 02:55 PM 6/18/02 +0200, Johannes Gebauer wrote: >On 18.06.2002 12:31 Uhr, Paul Delcour wrote > >> No one should be obliged to give their music away for free. That is >> indeed my choice. I do not expect anyone to be prepared to pay for it. >> But current laws state that copyright remains after death of maker for >> 75 years which is stupid. > >I don't think this is stupid at all.
In the US, copyright has an interesting history. It was based on previous law and tradition, but the wording of the US Constitution establishes it for a specific purpose (in Article I, Section 8 about the powers of Congress): "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The wording of this is both the basis of copyright here and also how it comes into conflict with the WIPO treaty. Unlike most of the phrases in Section 8 (such as "To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations"), the reasoning is also built in to the phrases. That tends to mean that the intention was to be carried out by the law -- "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," which dead people cannot do. It was given a social context later (families can inherit it), and with the establishment of artificial persons (corporations) largely in the 19th century, it was separated from the creative actions. With several extensions of coverage (photographs, recordings, software, etc.), it has become a vast protective network that, because of the corporatization of both the US and the WIPO signatories, is mostly useful to corporations like Disney, whose characters were about to expire when our long extension was passed here in the US. In any case, and though I'm a member of ASCAP which supports the new law, I oppose it as being contrary to the purpose of promoting 'progress of ... useful arts' and just more establishment of long-term ownerships that in fact impede development in many cases. The web of complex and artificially endowed rights and legal niceties (Javier just mentioned the one about the ability to use samples of performances because of performer issues) does not encourage creativity when the bulk of creative work must now be signed over to corporate interests based on employment contracts that make *all* creative work the property of an employer (whether it's made on or off the job) -- private intellectual property rights are already becoming a thing of the past, at least here. Already lawsuits over infinitesimally small sampling have chilled that atmosphere, and folks like Illegal Art and The Button are issuing recordings that challenge those corporatized developments. If this condition had been dominant in the past millennium, whole genres (like variations or parody masses) would have beem wiped out. It has become all the money, and not about the truth that the bulk of creativity derives from the society surrounding it, and does not spring clean and untouched from the mind. The balance initially intended (at least here in the US) has been lost. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
