Big Media finally screwed by a copyright law

50s-70s artists can take their copyrights back — or get more money for leaving them alone.

The [1976] Copyright Act includes two sets of rules for how this works. If an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978 (Section 304), they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. If the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978 (Section 203), they can terminate that grant after 35 years. Assuming all the proper paperwork gets done in time, record labels could lose sound recording copyrights they bought in 1978 starting in 2013, 1979 in 2014, and so on. For 1953-and-earlier music, grants can already be terminated.

The Eagles plan to file grant termination notices by the end of the year, according to Law.com. “It’s going to happen,” said Eveline. “Just think of what the Eagles are doing when they get back their whole catalog. They don’t need a record company now…. You’ll be able to go to Eaglesband.com (updated) and get all their songs. They’re going to do it; it’s coming up.”

It’s so delicious. Check out the comments on Wired: no sympathy at all. As the Eagles said, “Get over it!”

Copyright asses

Paul Aitken, the group’s executive director objects to the text-to-speech feature on Amazon’s Kindle 2 digital-book reader. Aitken told The Wall Street Journal: “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud. That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

“They” (whoever ‘they” are) aren’t reading a book. A machine (i.e., not a moral actor, but a tool) is reading a book. If it’s my tool, it’s reading it for me.  It’s funny that, to the best of my knowledge, people haven’t thrown fits over readers for the blind. But doesn’t adaptive technology such as this do exactly what the Kindle does? Doesn’t it equally violate copyright? Do the handicapped get to violate laws that the rest of us do not?  What if I’m a bad reader and move my lips while I’m reading? And this is the Writer’s Guild, not the the Screen Actor’s Guild or Equity or whoever represents voice talent in books-on-CD. Sandoval is right; if this is IP crime, then parents have been committing it for centuries.

Meanwhile, the Brits have decided that living musicians need to be protected from competition from dead ones, and are upping their protection of sound recordings to 95 years.