Dead Man Signing
Posted on December 9th, 2006 by Tim Almond
Lawrence Lessig has noticed that some of the 4,500 signatories of the "fair play for musicians ad" in the FT are dead.
If you read the list, you’ll see that at least some of these artists are apparently dead (e.g. Lonnie Donegan, died 4th November 2002; Freddie Garrity, died 20th May 2006). I take it the ability of these dead authors to sign a petition asking for their copyright terms to be extended can only mean that even after death, term extension continues to inspire.
And for the living guys… you don’t deserve an extension. If you were happy to record something when the term was 50 years, what do we get by extending your term?
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Can’t remember who said it and where, but I found this thought (at least this is how I remember it) interesting:
Why should artists still be paid for work they did more than 50 years ago? I can’t go back to any of my previous employers and ask them to pay me for work I did 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years ago…
To the above commenter. I think work lives on with an artist but day to day work does not. Tim, you may also be interested, this evening, in the blogfocus I’ve put up. I’d e-mail but you don’t have.
Armin,
The key thing is that as an employee, you sign away your rights, which artists don’t. If I write a program for a client, they frequently want to retain sole rights, but I have some software that I have copyrights on.
I do believe that copyright is probably too long at the moment, though.