Author: Stan
Welcome
Glad you could drop by. My name is Stan Cording and I’m a composer and pianist.
I’ve finally posted some music again. The last time I had some music here it ended up all over the web.
I don’t want to make people register or give me their email, just prove they’re not a bot or a web crawler.
I found some nice functions (not the usual Captcha) that do that for posting comments, etc., but not for protecting pages or links. Looks like I’ll have to write it myself when I have time.
Meanwhile, I found another solution that ought to work for a while (I hope), so the music is back!
performance copyright
As overall recording sales continue to fall, 8% last year according to IFPI, the IFPI and other lobbying groups are trying to raise what were secondary sources of income, royalty payments from performance rights. Payments from performance royalties rose 16% last year, and the IFPI is lobbying hard to double performance royalties.
A recent copyright settlement in Australia now results in 50 cents per nightclub customer being paid to the PPCA, and is scheduled to double ($1.05) soon. The PPCA argument is “if there was no music, there would be no nightclub”. The PPCA is now going after fitness clubs, wanting much larger royalties from them for playing music in their classes. And they have tariffs for nearly every conceivable situation, from playing music video clips in electronics and hi-fi stores for demonstration purposes to the music that is played to telephone callers on hold. No matter what your business, if you are making money, and recorded music is involved in any way, they want a slice of your pie.
These kind of royalties don’t exist in the US yet. But there is extensive lobbying going on to try to get it started, and congress may pass some kind of performance rights bill by the end of this year. Radio stations in the US pay royalties, but only to the songwriter, the record company and the performers don’t get royalties. There are plenty of people who would like to change that. A bill sponsored by Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat, Michigan, would result in radio stations paying royalties to record companies and the performing artists.
Meanwhile, some Australian and european nightclubs are threatening to play only American recordings, with American musicians, in order to avoid paying the royalties.
Whatever the final shakeout in these royalty battles, it looks like big changes in royalty payments and maybe even performances themselves, will result.
The complexity of copyright
Short article by Richard Koman on the crazy situation in copyright if you are trying to figure out if a work is still under copyright or in the public domain. He has a link to the tree view chart on Copyright Law that can be found at CopyrightData.com.
Richard’s article can be found here at ZDNet.
time to allow personal DVD copying
Here’s an article on Wired about how the DMCA prevents fair use of DVDs, with the result that making a copy of a DVD you own is technically against the law.
As usual, the situation is complicated and the status is in doubt, depending on how the lawsuit against ReadNetworks turns out.
conference on 100th anniversary of 1909 Copyright Act
Santa Clara University Law School had a conference last Thursday in honor of the 100th anniversary of the 1909 Copyright Act. It was the first copyright act to protect works upon publication with notice, without prior registration; the first to recognize the right to make derivative works; and the first to recognize public domain. Since the 1909 law was in effect for almost 70 years, it had a profound impact on our society and a significant influence on the copyright law of today. Mike Masnick posts a fascinating discussion of some of the things that were talked about at the conference on Techdirt.
re: perpetual copyright
Mark Helprin, author of A Solder of the Great War and Winter’s Tale wrote an op-ed in the New York Times two years ago arguing for further extension of copyright protection. He wrote a book, solidifying his argument, called Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.
If Helprin is right, then I can’t share his persuasive arguments with you, because they are part of his book and under copyright. If I thought Helprin was right, my only option, to propagate his ideas and try to gain their universal acceptance, would be to recommend that everyone in the world buy his book. You can see the problem here.
Fortunately, those of us who think some intellectual property is important enough to belong to society at large and that after some limited period of protection all intellectual property should eventually revert to the public, that fair-use plays an important role in society, etc. are not so hampered by our belief system.
See the great discussion at the Lessig Wiki.
Talk about a boring recital
There’s a performance going on of John Cage’s As Slow As Possible in Halberstadt, Germany. BBC’s Steve Rosenberg was there for a rare chord change, the 7th, in the concert that started in 2001.
I’d go, but the good part doesn’t happen for another couple of hundred years. I probably won’t make the ending either, in 2640.
Hear the BBC story here.
Europe moves toward Internet censorship
Read the debate at InfoWorld.
Cable’s bandwidth problem
Great article on why upload speed matters. While cable companies continue to advertise ever faster download speeds, upload speeds are not keeping pace, are seldom advertised and may be downright difficult to find listed in the fine print. It’s the two-way nature of the internet that is revolutionary, that we can be both content providers as well as content consumers, that keeps the internet from being just another TV/CD player/DVD player.
See the article at App Rising.