alt Hacker NewsYes, but it shouldn't have to. The youngest recordings we're talking about are ~65 years old. Few people even have gear to play the discs. Have the authors of these songs, the players on the recordings and the publishers of these discs not had enough of a chance to make their money? I'll take whatever judgement I can get in favor of the Internet Archive, but I think we should be aiming for a principled stance of enough copyright is enough!
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Copyright law isn’t written to be reasonable. It doesn’t matter if the rightsholder wrote a song 65 years ago and hasn’t made money selling it for decades, it’s protected for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. I’m sure everyone who comments on this would agree that’s far too long, but it doesn’t matter what we think. We could spend all day coming up with better ideas for how this could work, but the RIAA have no desire to budge on this at all, and there isn’t enough political will to overturn the current laws (all republicans and some democrats would oppose any attempt to do so).
> The youngest recordings we're talking about are ~65 years old.
So they could have gotten some value again as relics?
remember when they tried to codify it into an international treaty, effectively removing even congress' ability to control it?
IMO copyright simply isn’t fine grained enough. Allowing 1:1 copies after 20 years isn’t economically meaningful to the creators in general, but when you use a work as part of a movie, commercial, political campaign, etc it’s co opting the original creator as if they where endorsing what you’re doing. Which simply isn’t appropriate while the creator is alive.
On the other hand if you’re selling action figures you expect little kids to create their own stories with those characters. Culture has long mixed existing characters in new ways just look at any mythology before writing. Jokes, memes, fanfics, etc are the natural progression of a culture and giving up on that seems detrimental in ways that aren’t obvious.