Why Copyright Law STEALS From Us All

hello my name is David Bruce so I wanted to talk to you today about copyright which is one of the few subjects that makes me absolutely furious you know I certainly have political views about things but on the whole things are usually so complicated and confusing that in a lot of cases I can see two sides to an argument but when it comes to copyright I can see absolutely no valid argument for the way things are so anyone who is any kind of artist knows that creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum you're always taking other people's ideas getting inspired by them messing around with them twisting them putting them into new contexts re mixing them I guess anyone who isn't creative doesn't really realize how much this is part of the process and in today's world I think we're made to feel almost embarrassed and ashamed when we do this as copyright expert cambria McCloud said the law itself assumes a romantic notion of authorship the lone individual genius toiling away until a burst of creativity creates a truly original work unlike anything else that previously existed but we know that in the world of music you can't really create a new song without referring to an old song in some way culture is collaborative Walt Disney was actually a perfect example of how remix in culture works best which is ironic because the Disney Corporation are now one of the main villains in the world of copyright law Mickey Mouse is first outing the film Steamboat Willie was a parody of Buster Keaton steamboat bill and Keaton's film is itself based on a popular song steamboat bill many of the early classic Disney films were based on existing stories such as the grim fairy tales reimagining them completely often turning the dark and menacing originals into lighter more uplifting tales that the world fell in love with but today it's the Disney Corporation who are leading the way in lobbying to perpetually extend copyright protection and what makes this particularly hard to take is that had this been enforced in the early 20th century Disney's early successes just wouldn't have been possible [Music] culture is collaborative so nothing is created in a vacuum the same is true in the world of innovation and technology patent law if you come up with an invention you generally have 20 years to make a profit from your invention 20 years why is the timeframe set to that well it's because people feel that 20 years gives you a good amount of time to make some profit but not so much that you actually stifle further innovation you invent something really useful 20 years gives you time to develop and profit from your invention but then after that others can enter the market use your invention and compete with you driving innovation forward so you might argue over the precise length but overall things have been roughly that way in the technology world for quite some time and it seems to work pretty well so now let's compare that to what happens when it comes to the copyright world as things currently stand in Europe the rights to the work remain in place until 70 years after the death of the author so in the case of some of my favorite works say early works of Stravinsky they were written in the 1910s already over a hundred years ago while Stravinsky only died in 1971 so it's still another 22 years until twenty forty one before any of those works will go out of copyright in Europe over a hundred and thirty years after they were created in fact in 2011 an amendment to the European copyright directive changed the rules so that if there was more than one artist involved for example if a song had a lyricist as well as a composer then it's seventy years after the death of the last surviving created before the rights are released this was highly convenient in particular to the Gershwin estate one of the most profitable estates in music because of course many of George Gershwin's most famous songs were written with his brother Ira Gershwin as lyricist now George died in 1937 so in 2008 his works did I believe come out of copyright the IRA only died in wait for it 1983 so when the law changed that meant all those works embraceable you fascinating rhythm let's call the whole thing off they all went back into copyright and they won't be back out again until 2050 three in America the law is based on the number of years since the first publication or creation and as this graph shows it's been subject to numerous extensions and fiddles over the years so that now a lot of works remain in copyright for over 90 or even 120 years after their creation as a general rule of thumb only with works written before 1923 can you be pretty sure something is out of copyright now I'm not a lawyer of course though all of this is only my understanding so who benefits from this setter well there's only really one beneficiary and that's the estates of the rights to these works and it can be big business the Gershwin estate makes several million dollars a year and several major publishers have pretty much survived off the income of one or two big hits from 100 years ago and in some cases have gone into sharp decline once that copyright finally expired typically traditional publishers sign a contract with the composer to own their copyright outright so most composers who are with a publisher as soon as they finish a piece it's no longer theirs it is owned by the publisher and they will have made an agreement so that they will get maybe 50% of the performance royalties for the work during their lifetime but once they die and for the next 70 years after that all the money will go to the publisher the only justification for a copyright that continues after the death is the idea that copyright is like property and should be passed on from one heir to the next but that ignores several common sense counter arguments all of which point out some fairly tragic results of the current set up and all of which distinguish this kind of intellectual property from ordinary property firstly while those blockbuster hits do fine lesser-known works remain prohibitively expensive for groups to play they remain under the lock and key of the publisher and buying or hiring parts can be hugely expensive how on earth is a musical culture supposed to remain vibrant active and alive you know you're a college band let's say you could play a radical modern piece like Stravinsky yes I'm being sarcastic and by the score and parts per se $200 which is what they often cost or you could play Mozart and print off the parts for free from a website now your entire budget is $50 you borrowed from your mum so which option are you going to choose in fact when I shared a draft of the script for this video with my patrons on patreon Chris came back with a very similar story Chris is in an amateur clarinet quartet and he's stuck in two respects there are very few public domain pieces available to print out on the one hand and on the other if he wants to arrange anything himself he's in legally dubious territory if he tries his hand at anything less than a hundred years old so in both respects copyright causes the dissemination of newer works to be much more difficult now of course copyright law wasn't always this way the 1909 Copyright Act in the u.s. gave works 28 years of protection so similar to patent laws and there was an option for a one time renewal for a further 28 years if the owner went to the trouble of renewing it that particular aspect is so important because what makes me angry more than anything and this is tragedy number two is that the law as it currently stands automatically applies to all works of art now for the vast majority probably 90% of works or more a few years after their creation nobody really cares about them anymore the original copyright owner has moved on and doesn't care but those works are still not accessible to us without fear of legal action in many cases they're locked away in a publishers basement never seeing the light of day or in other cases nobody even knows who owns the copyright these are known as orphan works so there's literally no way you can know for sure if you're legally able to use it and the third tragedy is probably the most important and it comes back to the fact of creativity excessive copyright prevents innovation and that's true whatever the art form in his book creative license the law and culture of digital sampling ken broo MacLeod talks about how the Golden Age of sampling was between 1987 and 1992 record companies still thought hip hop was a fad so they didn't pay attention to what these artists were doing this gave hip hop artists the creative elbow room to run wild with this new technology and make music in whatever way they wanted without worrying about a lawyer looking over their shoulder and then two lawsuits in the early 90s scared the entire industry enough to mean that from then on they would become far more cautious and only allow artists to use samples if they could clear the rights but finding rights holders and clearing samples can be incredibly expensive time consuming or even impossible and macleod suggests that two influential hip-hop releases The Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique and Public Enemies fear of a black planet would be financially in bureaucratic impossible to release today due to their heavy sampling to realize how messed up this whole thing is it's painful to realize that samples could potentially fall under the doctrine of fair use which holds that transformative use of material is acceptable it's hard to see how using a fragment of an old song within a hip-hop beat is not transformative but in the u.s. the expense of taking a test case all the way to the Supreme Court is so great that no one has ever done so most have settled out of court before a ruling could be made but if anything what we're seeing in the u.s. in particular is things moving in an even more worrying direction the blurred lines case where the jury found that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke's blurred lines had copied Marvin Gaye's got to give it up seems very very close to insisting that a feel for a piece of music can be copyrighted and if that really did become the case then basically pop music is doomed now I realized that the use of samples and the problems of classical music publishing are two somewhat different issues but they're also part of the same issue we faced with the pendulum swinging too far in favor of the rights holders the simple fact is just like in patent law copyright law ought to be a balance between the whole point of copyright which is to encourage and incentivize artists knowing that they'll be able to benefit financially from their work but balancing that with the need for society and future artists to have access to these works it's not like there aren't solutions a cloud for example advocates a compulsory license system which means that Congress could fix the level of compensation that rights holders receive for sampling uses so there'd be no need to hire lawyers and negotiate each time but the rights holders would still get some compensation that's the pendulum swinging back into balance and when it comes to the works of classical composers I'm not at all arguing that composers while they're alive shouldn't be able to reap the rewards of their works they should something like the original 1909 approach seems about right give an automatic period of say 30 years and if the work happens to be really successful then you could extend it for another 30 to be honest I would settle for an optional extension until the death of the author but what I just think is outright wrong is Verte to extend beyond death once the author's dead I firmly believe all of these older works should be part of our cultural heritage they should be ours as a society to use as we want this is how things worked for Disney and Gershwin and to me the degree to which this has happened really does represent a theft of what should rightfully belong to all of us and it makes me really cross one further solution is for artists who aren't concerned with financially profiting from their work and that is the Creative Commons license which was established by Lawrence Lessig and others Creative Commons offers you various ways of granting a license for others to use your work in various ways you can offer it freely for non-commercial use or reuse with attribution or just completely open to reuse in any form it's the equivalent of the open source movement in software development which itself has successfully shown how a less controlled and less protected environment can lead to huge benefits and successes both for individuals and society as a whole Creative Commons is a valuable addition which offers both an alternative to artists but also helps highlight the need for different options lesyk himself has been a strong proponent of copyright reform and an advocate for a strong public domain and I highly recommend his book free culture as well as common as air by Lewis Hyde if you want to look into this topic more I should say for full disclosure that I have a stake in both sides of this argument because I am of course a composer and having a right to earn three pounds thirty-seven royalties from a performance of one of my piano pieces is one that I treasure and on the other side as many of you know I run the eighth notes comm website which offers arrangements of out of copyright public domain pieces from traditional and classical music and I can certainly admit that taking the copyright laws back to 1900 would certainly benefit me a lot there but to me this isn't about money it's about artistic freedom and the need to understand the way art and culture moves forward to give just two further examples most of the works by one of the 20th century's most innovative artists Andy Warhol would be impossible in today's copyright climate and in music to see how even first rank artists remix old work look at John Adams his work absolute jest which takes clips from Beethoven string quartets and molds them into what I think is one of his best pieces you could easily imagine that Adams might have fancy doing something like this with say Stravinsky instead but of course it probably didn't even cross his mind we've all set ourselves by default to assume that any music that has any sense of modernity to it is not something we can play with like this so a living thriving developing self referential culture has just become all but impossible but I'd love to hear your thoughts on all this do let me know in the comments please subscribe here to my channel follow me on Instagram and Twitter and if you want to support the channel even more go to my patreon page patreon.com/lenguin [Music]

Channel: David Bruce Composer

Views: 33,305

Rating: 4.9527345 out of 5

Keywords: copyright, copyright law, public domain, gershwin copyright, disney copyright

Id: 87wHYATdPXs

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Johnny_B_GOODBOI]

I've seen a few David Bruce videos, as i like music and he has some cool music vids. I love when channels that aren't politically focused are low-key leftie! I had a suspicion about David, same one i have about 12tone.

[u/ChetDinkly]

Read "Bad Samaritans."

Pretty much every country that developed violated copyright laws like crazy.

It's often monopolization of essential resources and hence stealing sovereignty and the right for a country to choose its destiny.

[u/0-_-_n_-_-0]

The birthday song being released to public domain was a rare win against excessive copyright.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/happy-birthday-is-public-domain-former-owner-warnerchapell-to-pay-14m/

Richard Stallman is an interesting dude in this space too. He pretty much started the free software movement and copyleft

Interview of RMS on Rt

[u/boltyboltbolt]

Uh, need to watch this later

[u/[deleted]]

I didn't now copyright was different from patent law so I've learned something today.

[u/koottravel]

even though I know so little about the technical sides of music, I've been a big fan of his videos and have learned a lot. I've always been morally opposed to the copywrite laws we have, so it's fantastic to see someone I really like who has skin in this game saying the same.