At 8:31 AM -0500 7/9/10, Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
dhbailey wrote, in part:
I ...<snippage>... am intrigued by the way that many people seem to
think that additional exposure to a potential wider buying audience is
what we musicians want,
I blame the model of the commercial radio stations for this. Years
before there was an "all-talk, all the time" format, there was music
on the radio, and one did not have to pay for it to enjoy it. You
turned it on for free, and there was music. You only had to pay if
you didn't want to hear what everyone else apparently did,
Hi, Noel. I have no idea how old you are, or whether you remember
the Payola scandals of the '60s, but they were big news and a really
big deal back then. DJs were being bribed to add specific songs to
their playlists, and that's a whole lot different from just buying
advertising time. And incidentally, the record companies did NOT buy
advertising time, although they did distribute free copies of their
new records.
Unfortunately our record companies were too darned honest, so The
Four Saints records weren't released, they escaped! And sold mostly
as souvenirs on personal appearances. Because of the record
companies' creative bookkeeping, very few people ever made actual
money from their recordings, but according to our agent he could
raise his acts' personal appearance fees $500 a night every time they
got a record on the charts.
and I would suggest that while there might be benefit to the people
to provide a statutory definition of "fair use", it would be much
more useful to provide a statutory definition of "limited times".
No statute can cover every possible attempt to do an end run around
the law, unfortunately. But extending copyright to longer than
anyone's life expectancy is bizarre in the extreme. A great many of
us would be happy with a new provision in the law that if a work is
permanently out of print for a year or more (pick your own time
span), copyright reverts to the composer/arranger/whomever, who may
then offer it to another publisher or self-publish it. I don't
expect to see it in my lifetime, though. U.S. law treats copyrights
and patents as property, and copyright law is property law, just as
the laws supporting human slavery was based on property law.
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[email protected])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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