When your creation is not yours anymore..

[Moonbiter]

As a former musician and recording artist, I find this:

Aging rockers set to lose copyrights - CNN.com

.. to be a rather interesting topic. I made music back when the internet was a geek wet dream, downloading was "science fiction" and there was an eternal war going on between artists and record companies fighting bootleggers. We have now reached a point where "classic rock" and popular music recorded in Europe 50 years ago will become public property, for everyone to exploit. Personally, I find this more than a bit disturbing.

Any thoughts?

[Magrus]

My brother went into college as an art student, and switched to music student after 2 years. My step-father employs a guitarist for a former band called Omniblank. The guitarist never made any money with his band, as the record label ripped the band off, which is why he's working a day job and now doing music as a hobby. In this respect, I suppose I have to consider the people I know in my life when processing this.

I thought over the whole scene with art and my brother years ago, when he was wanting to draw cartoons at age 12. The thing being, artists rarely break even or profit off of their work. The only time their work garners large amounts of money is after they are dead. Music however, it is more likely you will get some money off of your work than art nowadays. Still, not by much.

In the respect that most people who become national sensations now tend to hit the charts between the ages of 16-25, a 50 year protection on their music would amount to seeing their music becoming free around the time of retirement age. This puts a different spin on things than I would normally go for with my protective instincts for my little brother. I am trying to picture myself as an artist, and being 65-70. So long as I was comfortable and could retire without worrying about shelter or food and the such, would I care? Not really to be honest. If I wasn't? Well, that would be a different story.

Yet, if I made say, a sculpture. Took me 3 months to craft and I'd been looking at it for the past 50 years when I was retired. Then someone just took it, and gave it to their girlfriend and I had no say in it. I would be mighty pissed over that. However, that would be more due to the total loss of my work and not having it anymore. The musicians involved wouldn't be losing the ability to retain what they made, just the ability to profit off of it.

I'd say this pretty much boils down to is, does the musician deserve to garner payment for his/her works for someone besides themself? Because, really, lets say you get a record produced when you are 20, another when you are 22, and a third when you are 30. This means, your stuff becomes free when you turn 70, 72, and finally, 80. 10 years down the road, chances are that you have died due to old age, heart failure, cancer, etc in this day and age by the time you have reached 90. Who benefits now? You're children, and their children. Do they deserve to reap the benefits of your work? Or do the fans of your work deserve to be able to share it with their children and grandchildren and have a legacy from their favorite artists shared with everyone who wants it?

Myself, I would like to think that I would want it to be reverted to sole ownership by the musicians after 50 years. No more involvement from any businesses or what not. However, at that point, I believe I wouldn't mind sharing it with others. Not for profit, but just out of the sake of knowing that there are others so much younger than I am who would still want to hear my lifes work.

[Bloodstalker]

I don't see how this can have the sweeping affect it's being portrayed as having. For one thing, as the article points out, songwriters have much longer protections for their material. That should discount the affect for most of the material of bands like Zepplin and Sabbath, among many others, who wrote a lot of their own material. While they may not have the same rights of the actual recording of a song, the fact that they control the song from an authors position looks to me like it would cancel that out. Personally, I don't think someone who records someone elses song as being the same thing as one who writes and records their own material, simply because the original ownership of the song doesn't belong to the artist anyway. Any artist who records someone elses material is simply presenting an interpretation of that work, they didn't create it, they simply interpreted it. As such, I'm not sure that 50 years isn't a fair length of time to protect an interpretation. I have no problem with a 50 year limit of protection on Elvis Presley's cover of Little Richards "Long Tall Sally", for example. Of course that leads to a whole different issue of that fact that many of the songwriters from that era had no rights to their own material anyway due to the record companies ripping them off.

It just seems to me that the actual creators of the material, the writers, will still have control of their material in spite of this whole thing. Provided they ever kept it in the first place, which is sadly not the case in many instances in the early 60's and 50's. Just my two cents and all.

[Moonbiter]

Written by Bloodstalker:

Quote:

It just seems to me that the actual creators of the material, the writers, will still have control of their material in spite of this whole thing. Provided they ever kept it in the first place, which is sadly not the case in many instances in the early 60's and 50's. Just my two cents and all.

I think you should read the article again, there seems to be a slight misunderstanding here... The entire point is that the creators of the music will lose their ownership of their original recordings7creations.

[Bloodstalker]

Quote:

Richard has said he would like to see copyright protection for singers and record labels extended, pointing out that songwriters enjoy protection for their lifetime plus 70 years.

This is the part of the article I was talking about. Under this, the writer of the song is protected far longer than the recording artist. However, if the recording artist wrote the song, then that artist should enjoy the same long term protection. Hence, my statement that the creatoer (writers) of the songs will still be protected.

[Magrus]

Oh, well that could cause a stir. Not my type of music, but I remember when the artist Babyface was big for all of 37 minutes when I was younger. Then he suddenly stopped performing, and instead writing for everyone else in the genre. So, when he's older, he will be the owner for half of the R&B songs written in the 90's and not the people who sold all of the records performing the songs. I think that will be quite funny to be honest.

[Moonbiter]

Quote:

Oh, well that could cause a stir. Not my type of music, but I remember when the artist Babyface was big for all of 37 minutes when I was younger. Then he suddenly stopped performing, and instead writing for everyone else in the genre. So, when he's older, he will be the owner for half of the R&B songs written in the 90's and not the people who sold all of the records performing the songs. I think that will be quite funny to be honest.

I should have known this place would not be the place to post or discuss this.

Boogie on, folks....

[Magrus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moonbiter I should have known this place would not be the place to post or discuss this. Boogie on, folks....

*shrugs* As I said before, my brother is an artist and a musician in training. If he wrote and performed his own music, and it was taken from him, he'd have every right to be pissed. However, if he paid for someone else to write the song, got rich off singing it, and then 20 years before he died, the full ownership reverted back to the person who he paid to write it, he'd understand that. He's a smart boy.

There is a difference between being the person who created something, than one who is the face behind selling it. That's like having an actor whine if he stops getting paid for a movie he was in, when someone does a remake later and his part is played by someone younger and new. The actor didn't write the lines, he just said them while being filmed. There is a difference. No need to get pissy about it.